1. Kudos to the Guardian for enlisting every film monkey who can type to produce their extensive Cannes coverage. (Granted, Brits::Cote d’Azur, fish::barrel, and it’s not exactly a hardship post, either.)
2. Or maybe it is. The Guardian crew seems to be suffering from serious alcohol-free delusion. The evidence is in the writing:
Trapped in the (presumably dry) media lounge, Matt Keating is forced to piece a story together using only quotes from his partying fellow journos.
The two main themes of Fiachra Gibbons’ Cannes diary are old stories of old British actors’ penchant for bluedarting (hint: there’s a Badass Buddy icon for it.) and complaints about being barred from the bar at the Matrix Reloaded party.
The result? A crazytalk-filled, sobriety-induced revenge piece, “Taliban Thinking”, where he draws a bizarrely Stryker/Wolfowitzian conclusion about Animatrix. “As with the Terminator, which uses the same thin philosophical veil of man versus machine, the message is simple. If the rebellious robots had been stamped out straight away, Zion would now be safe. [italics added]
Then, Gibbons’ colleague, Andrew Pulver, also slams Animatrix but for another, wrong-end-of-the-telescope reason. “Attempting to dress up the fictional man/machine conflicts with images from contemporary political protest (The Million Machine March and the like) was not a good idea. African-Americans, Chinese democracy activists, liberal demonstrators – the implication is that they will enslave us all. [Italics=kooky theory #2]”
Am I high? Just check out Fiachra’s last report from France. Garcon, get these people a drink toute de suite.
