During this afternoon’s Expendables 3 press conference at the Carlton, which I was totally down with not attending, Sylvester Stallone was asked “how do know when you are too old to be an action star?” His response: “You wake up in the morning and your ass falls off. Then you know.” He added, “Let me tell you — we are children with arthritis.” Does that mean they have arthritis but are buoyed by the spirit of children? Or that they have super-early-stage arthritis, or the kind that children might have? Harrison “Paycheck” Ford was there — he’s in this video briefly.

Cannes Film Festival tourists always congregate around the entrances to the big hotels on the Croisette on weekends, obviously hoping to catch sight of a celebrity. The Martinez and the J.W. Marriott allow closest access to the unwashed masses. (The Carlton and the Majestic have security guys keeping onlookers from getting any closer than the street.) Is there any activity on the planet that more loudly screams “we have no shame, we are the world champions of lame”? Three or four giggly girls were squealing with delight over something (i.e., probably nothing) just before I took this in front of the Marriott. Regular guests had to be escorted inside by security.

Totally taken by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson — a more beautiful Cannes snap than any I’ve ever taken here.

Longtime Boston Globe and New England Cable News cricket Jay Carr has left the earth. He was chief Globe critic from ’83 to ’02, and hosted NACN’s “Jay Carr’s Screening Room” from ’98 to ’10. Carr won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and in ’89 was named “Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et Lettres” for his writings on French film.

“Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first [Lord of the Rings] movie, yes, there’s Rivendell and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes — it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like [all] that to the power of 10.” — Viggo Mortensen on Rings/Hobbit maestro Peter Jackson in recently-published Telegraph interview.

I was too freaked about my destroyed iPhone to concentrate on Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York, which screened last night at 9 pm, but Variety‘s Scott Foundas had this reaction: “The career-imploding misadventures of former IMF chief (and presumptive French presidential candidate) Dominique Strauss-Kahn get filtered through the uniquely lurid prism of director Abel Ferrara in Welcome to New York, a bluntly powerful provocation that begins as a kind of tabloid melodrama and gradually evolves into a fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege.

Every critic I’ve read so far loves Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales — easily the biggest breakout hit thus far of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. I knew it was a home run less than five minutes after it began. It’s safe to say that if you don’t love this film there’s almost certainly something wrong with you. Raves have been posted by Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Hitfix.com‘s Drew McWeeny, The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney, Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, etc.

I was waiting in my Salle Debussy seat for the 7 pm screening of Alice Rohrbacker‘s Le Meravaglie when my iPhone slipped off my lap and through the crack at the the rear of the seat. I realized it was missing a minute or two later and started searching around. I got down and reached around on the floor…nothing. Then I sat down again. I noticed my seat wasn’t collapsing all the way to a sitting position, and — genius engineer that I am — it didn’t occur to me that the missing phone, which was lying inside the seat-hinge mechanism, might be the cause. So like an idiot I flopped down on the seat and in so doing crushed my iPhone to death. I reached into the seat crack and pulled out the damaged remains. Lights off, inoperable, glass cracked, ruined Mophie charger — totally destroyed.

Now the same process that I went through in Germany last year begins again — buy a new iPhone for the maximum price in New York, have my son send it over via Fed Ex for God knows how much money…an instant death-hit of $1200 or more.

Until the new phone arrives I’ll just have to make calls on Skype. A pain but not that much of a problem — just expensive. It would be a howling nightmare if all this had happened, say, five or ten years ago. Synching issues are not the problem they used to be. It’s not that bad. Tonight so far this problem has eaten Le Meravaglie and the 9 pm screening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York.

As I hear it, Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys — a largely sympathetic, warm-hearted documentary about former Cannon honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — was made to counterbalance the impact of a forthcoming, less-compassionate doc about the Israeli-born moguls from Mark Hartley called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. I was therefore expecting an overly fawning portrait from Medalia’s doc, which I saw last night, and it does constitute a charitable view. It looks the other way at loads of lively material that could have been used. (Having worked for Cannon as a press kit writer during ’86 and ’87, I know whereof I speak.) But as obliging portrayals go, The Go-Go Boys is a reasonably accurate and fair-minded one. It feels as if it was made by an intelligent member of Golan or Globus’s inner family — intimate, admiring and even faintly critical from time to time.

The problem is that The Go-Go Boys won’t acknowledge the elephant in the Cannon room. The reason Menahem and Yoram made almost nothing but crap is that they loved the action and the chutzpah in their veins (winning awards, making money, signing big names, the crackling excitement of “being there”), but they never really got it. Their affection for movies was enthusiastic but primitive. An under-educated rug-merchant mentality could never really fit into a business that is also, at heart, a kind of religion. The best filmmakers have always operated on a devotional Catholic principle. I believe that Menahem and Yoram were never devoted enough to the faith and traditions of great, soul-stirring cinema. They never really respected the idea of wearing cinematic monk robes.

I’ve decided to once again blow off Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, which screens today at the Salle du Soixantieme at 2:30 pm. I’ll get to it one of these days or weeks, but the dispiriting reviews (reactions from Hitfix‘s Guy Lodge and Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang) that came out of yesterday’s debut showing are enough to persuade me to wait and see it down the road. I will always respect and admire Ceylan, but currently other obligations are opportunities are elbowing his latest aside.

My plan for today is to see the much-buzzed-about Wild Tales at 11:45 am, followed by the 2 pm Salle Debussy screening of Ned Benson‘s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, the 6:30 pm showing of the 150-minute-long Saint Laurent (perhaps only an hour or 90 minutes’ worth…we’ll see) and then, finally, Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York at 9 pm, which will be followed at 11 pm by some kind of press schmoozer with Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset.

“Ever wonder about Terrence Malick‘s 30-years-in-the-making Voyage of Time? Well, it seems the film will now emerge at the [2014] Cannes market. Wild Bunch and Berlin-based Sophisticated Films are set to present first images from the feature to festival buyers. They’re saying [the film] will hit theaters in a feature-length version in 2016, with a 40-minute version in the IMAX format.” — 5.13.14 post by Indiewire‘s Beth Hanna.

Early last evening Harvey Weinstein & Co. hosted a Majestic Hotel preview of the Weinstein Co.’s 2014 and ’15 slate. St. Vincent costar Naomi Watts and Woman in Gold star Ryan Reynolds said a few words before the product reel was shown. The films included Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (which looks really good), Suite Francaise, The Giver, Macbeth, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (which screens twice on Saturday), Begin Again and the afore-mentioned St. Vincent (a relationship comedy with Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts and Chris O’Dowd, formerly titled St. Vincent de Van Nuys). Also previewed were The Imitation Game, a cuddly CG bear comedy called Paddington and a forthcoming Antoine Fuqua-directs-Jake Gyllenhaal boxing movie called Southpaw.

I was struck by the absence of any florid Shakespearean verse in the footage for the Michael Fassbender-and-Marion Cotillard Macbeth (due in ’15) so I asked Harvey if the film contains any of that. “It’s cut down,” Harvey said. “[The film is] very conducive to mainstream audiences.” So this new Macbeth doesn’t resemble the 1971 Polanski version? “No, no…it’s somewhere in the middle but it’s very understandable,” Harvey replied. So instead of Fassbender saying “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he’ll just say “tomorrow”? Here’s the mp3 of our brief discussion.