“You studio assholes have been lording it over us all this time and we licked your backsides, but [now we] are in the most insecure media job market in decades while you drive around your Hummers and pay lip service to environmentalism and complain when your second maid is sick and worry about paying for your next $20,000 vacation, and if kissing your asses isn’t going to help us secure our positions and we see people getting famous (if relatively poor) by selling mean-spirited gossip on the web , guess where we are going?” — David Poland ‘s dead-on read of the attitude of entrenched old media types towards here-and-now Hollywood, in a nicely observed piece about the media’s vicious slamming so far of big-budget summer flicks. (My only beef is Poland’s bizarrely persisting negativity towards An Inconvenient Truth, as indicated by the “while you drive around in your Hummers and pay lip service to environmentalism” line.

Four days into the Cannes Film Festival (the fifth night is tonight — Saturday, 5.20) and here’s the tally sheet: no major explosions, one widely agreed-upon stink bomb (Ron Howard‘s The Da Vinci Code); a couple of missed screening ops (on my part, I mean); a pair of strong and exciting efforts from the masterful Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) and the great Pedro Almodovar (Volver), with my personal preference leaning toward the latter; a thrashingly emotional, jizz-sticky, psycho-therapeutic homoerotic love story from John Cameron Mitchell called Shortbus , a film that is nothing if not emotionally intense, but also summoned memories of Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo (distribution in the U.S. is very much an open question) and which prompted me to reconsider the virtues living a Spin & Marty, red state-type life on a horse ranch in New Mexico; a light but quite radiant Paris anthology film (Paris Je’taime ) in which the standout effort is indisputably Alexander Payne ‘s, called “14th arrondisement”; and Summer Palace, a marginally irritating, ersatz-French nouvelle vague Chinese love story from Lou Ye…way, way overpraised.

Hollywood Elsewhere managed five or six minutes of face time with An Incovenient Truth star and 2000 Presidential election victor Al Gore yesterday evening at the Paramount Vantage launch party. Maybe a minute of opening pleasantries and praise (love the film, seen it three times, definitely the most important film of the year bar none), and then a compliment about the writing and delivery of Gore’s opening narration. Gore’s recollection of standing on the bank of a slow-moving river (presumably somewhere near his home in Tennessee) turns into a serene and unforced riff on the primally soothing power of nature. “It wasn’t written…it was extemporaneous,” he said. “But it was Davis Guggenheim [the film’s director] who pulled it out of me. We were in a studio and I was talking about my feelings about nature and all, and he said, ‘But why? What are you really saying?’ And I’d say it again with a little more of a personal tone, and he’d say again, ‘But where is this coming from…you know, deep down?’ And I was saying to myself with some frustration, ‘Well…hey,’ but I tried it again and he kept at me, and the final result is what’s in the film.” I mentioned that an actress-waitress I invited to see An Inconvenient Truth a few weeks back and that she’d said nope, no thanks, don’t wanna see it. I tried to talk her into it but she was adamant, convinced that Truth would be too talky or depressing or whatever. (Which it absolutely isn’t.) “What did she finally think of the film?” Gore asked. “She wouldn’t see it…I couldn’t get her to come,” I replied. He shook his head, a tick of diappointment. “And it’s people like her that somehow have to be reached,” I said. The air inside the party was on the warmish side, and I noticed that the former Vice President was pink-faced and sweating slightly as we spoke. He later made his way to the large opening that overlooked the beach and the bay. I could see a flicker of relief come over him as he caught a deep breath and took it all in.

Oh, and by the way: Jerry Seib‘s Wall Street Journal piece about An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Vantage, 5.23 limited) reports that “when the movie was previewed at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, an official there noted that the widespread reaction among Geographic employees who had seen the film earlier was: ‘Do you think he’ll run again for president ?’ Mr. Gore responded with a dismissive wave of his hand.” But this notion has been on the lips of Cannes journalists also. Everyone in liberal circles seems to be saying that the 2008 Democratic Party nomination is a fait accompli for Hilary Clinton, but SHE CAN’T WIN and Gore conceivably could. The bubbas despise Clinton and so do a lot of guys I know with liberal inclinations. (They see some kind of steely bitchy thing inside her.) Plus she seemed a lot more liberal when she was Bill Clinton’s First Lady than since she’s been as a U.S. Senator from New York. Maybe people see Gore as yesterday’s news or maybe not, but we need somebody in the White House who really gets what’s happening to our planetary climate and understands that there’s no more time for shilly-shallying .

The great Ian McKellen was at the cocktail gathering prior to last night’s showing of the Dreamgirls footage (and again — the more I think about it, the more kick-assy it seems…director Bill Condon has never directed a big-league musical before, only dramas…but the footage told me he has a great instinctual knack for making this sort of material fly…the photography, cutting, singing and performances were all knockout-plus).

Anyway, I asked McKellen about the rumored Magneto movie, and he said that vague rumors about this project were all he’s been hearing himself. He understands, however, that if it happens it will be about a young Magneto — an origin story — but also that CG technology has evolved to a point to where older actors such as himself can be digitally youthified (i.e., time-reversed back to their physical prime) and that this would allow him to play Magneto-the-younger himself. “Do you realize what this means?” he said in his usual sly and whimsical tone. “Vertan actors will no longer grow old, or even older…no more need for younger replacements.”

John Cameron Mitchell‘s Shortbus at the Salle Bazin at 11 a.m. this morning (32 minutes from now)…big-deal press conference for An Inconvenient Truth happening at 4:30 pm, leaving a three-hour window for some filing prior to this…missed Andrea Arnold‘s Red Road yesterday…three journos told me it’s a bit of a mixed enterprise, not quite there, etc., but two others called it riveting and very special…every fourth day here you need to downshift and stop running around or you’ll lose it entirely… for me and (I suspect) almost everyone else here, Saturday is that day.

Uhhmm, okay…I wasn’t hip enough to get the joke at first, but I do now. (Finally.) I received a screening invite by e-mail yesterday evening (on 5.19) that I found “curiously touching” (as I wrote in my initial posting). “I feel for these guys on some level,” I said. The invite read as follows, typos included: “Please you will come to this. First screening outside Almaty! Tuesday, 23 May, 10 pm, Olympia Cinema, 5 rue d?Antibes, Cannes. RSVP azamat@borat.tv — Kazakhstan Ministry of Information Present You Invite to special screening of BORAT — CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN. Please you will come to this . First screening outside Almaty!” Then Drew McWeeny wrote and said, “That invitation you called ‘touching’ was a joke. It’s for the new Sasha Cohen comedy, Borat…the one that Todd Phillips walked off of last year. I guarantee it’s worth your time. Go, go, go, go.” The director is Larry Charles , who did Masked and Anonymous….whoa. Here’s an early Borat review.

The special thrill and value of flying six thousand or so miles to Cannes to personally witness, in part, the rooty-toot-toot Dreamgirls shebang that happened tonight at the Martinez Hotel (which I enjoyed very much, by the way — the four scenes that were shown were seriously killer wham-bam)…where was I?…oh, yeah…the value of seeing this presentation in Cannes is diminished somewhat by David Poland having seen the same thing back in Los Angeles. (But not, I’m told, by way of DreamWorks publicity.) In fact, it sppears he saw it earlier than the Cannes gang did because he managed to post his reactions earlier than me or anyone else who attended in Cannes. This sounds petty, I realize.

Snakes on a Plane buzz is dropping. It’s peaked! The juice it had two months ago is evaporating! Or at least, that’s what Marketing Prof’s Matt Collier believes. “The key concern all along was that perhaps this was a case of buzz-building too soon for a movie that was still five to six months away from release. As the Alexa traffic for Snakes on a Blog, the ‘unofficial’ fan site for the film suggests here, the buzz for the B-movie appears to be fading. As New Line is learning the hard way, perhaps the only thing harder than building buzz for a movie, could be sustaining it.” I think everyone knew from the get-go that the Snakes buzz wouldn’t sustain. The idea all along, in fact, was that New Line’s marketing campaign would start revving up sometime in early to mid July and get the hype going again.