Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood is the first screening of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, starting at 10 ayem. Give it another go or hunker down in the Orange press room and wait for the 12:45 pm press conference? Scott won’t be there due to knee surgery, but I intend to ask Russell Crowe about perceptions that it’s a tea-bagger movie, or at least that it panders to tea-bagger sentiments.

If I was a commercial airline pilot, I would dodge the Iceland volcanic ash by flying to Europe in the style of Slim Pickens’ Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove, maintaining an altitude of no more than two or three hundred feet. “If we was flyin’ any lower we’d need sleighbells on this thing…”

It was decided at last night’s La Pizza gathering that Quentin Dupieux‘s Rubber, an 85-minute film about a killer tire with psychic powers, is probably worth seeing. It’ll be shown here as a special Critics’ Week screening (La Semaine de la Critique) sometime soon. Just don’t ask me to supply the date, time and location. I got enough aggravation.

Dupieux directed, wrote and shot it. The cast is headed by Stephen Spinella, Roxane Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Ethan Cohn and Charley Koontz.

“I’m still na√Øve enough to believe that there is still room for unconscious and format-free films,” Dupieux says. “The too formatted films, structured as emotional machines, annoy me. I like the idea of doing a film on a living tire, with no narrative structure nor dramatic stakes. It’s possible!

“Also, The budget was very limited : I conceived the script, taking into account our means, and I like working like that a lot.

“Rubber is the story of a serial killer tire that refers to his youth: Around the age of 12, my father’s video camera made me feel like filming. Then I discovered horror movies in video clubs and I instinctively needed to remake some fragments at home. And why a tire? I can’t answer questions starting by why. Life is full of mysteries. Why don’t we see the air around us? Why a tire? This is the same question.”

After two or three hours of half-sleep on the plane, the basic strategy when you first get here is not to take naps and stay up until 11 pm or midnight so you’ll at least sleep through the night. I stayed up until just before 1 am last night, and then awoke at 4 am — brilliant. My New York body doesn’t know what’s happening. The little apartment, at least, is quite pleasant. It’s been repainted and re-furnished, and the wifi is much better than it was last year.

Tuesday, 5.11, 10:05 pm. In a pinch, iPhone pics never seem to work in low light.

Snapped toward the end of last night’s La Pizza gathering. L.A. Times contributor Pete Hammond didn’t make it due to a late connecting flight from Germany; ditto Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, who arrived on a volcano-delayed flight from Zurich.

What’s this fucking thing? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a French praying mantis. You’re supposed to hang it from a hook in the ceiling and then use the plastic clothes pins, etc. I think it’s hideous — I could imagine it appearing as a kind of walking plastic octopus in a Tim Burton stop-motion film.

Of sleep, I mean. On last night’s NY-to-Nice jet. Sleep so near to waking it barely deserves the name. And then the Nice-to-Cannes A8 bus line decided not to provide extra buses to accommodate the influx of festivalgoers. (Naturally!). So after hanging around for an hour or so the bunch of us split two cabs. 80 euros divided by three — jacked.

Waiting for a slacker bus at Nice Airport — (l. to r.) Indiewire critic Eric Kohn (green T-shirt), Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday, Indiewire columnist/commemntator Anne Thompson, USA Today Anthony Breznican. (If you don’t look at the camera you don’t get identified.)

And then I picked up my press pass and got the keys to the apartment and so on. That’s it — there’s nothing to say beyond that and I’m too shagged to think stuff up. Maybe later.

The person who designed this festival bag did so with the idea of agitating honorable straight men, none of whom would dream of walking around town with this shiny thing dangling from their shoulder unless they had no other choice.

Definitely the way to watch Avatar — on a six-inch-wide flatscreen on the back of someone’s seat.