Michael Cieply visiting the Louisiana shoot of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has produced the funniest N.Y. Times headline for a movie-location story in years. And the funniest quite in the story is from Russian-based director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted), whose animalistic sensibilities are an industry legend: “What Lincoln did was like what Jesus did 2,000 years ago — he freed people.”

It’s 6:15 am and I’ve been up for nearly four hours, unable to feel even a little bit sleepy. I crashed around midnight after a very long day and after four or five glasses of wine at the La Pizza gathering, and I awoke less than three hours later. I know how this works. The blueish early-morning light is starting to give way to straight sunlight and the seagulls are swooping around and cawing — that and the distant buzz-saw roar of scooters makes for a curiously soothing dawn symphony.

The festival’s first screening — Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris , which one source is calling his best since Deconstructing Harry and therefore better than Match Point — happens at 11 am. Another person who saw it gave it a pleasant passing grade but wasn’t over the moon about it.

I had to delete over 1000 spam posts a while ago — a record for a 24-hour period. All of them from the same Eastern European fiends who’ve been torturing this site for years.

By my usual cheapo standards, Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday and I are paying a lot of dough — 1600 euros, or roughly 160 euros or $224 US per day — to stay in our pad at 7 rue Jean Mero. Okay, I guess $112 US per day each isn’t so bad. On the other hand it’s indisputably the most attractive place I’ve ever rented during the Cannes Film Festival.

Cannes apartment 2011 from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

The building was apparently constructed sometime in the mid 1800s. White plaster walls, overhead beams, cute shuttered windows, homey. Nice sunny patio, cute little bathroom with a tub. Clean and cozy, sort of French farmhouse-y.

During last January’s Sundance Film Festival, I wrote that Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood‘s’s Magic Trip (Magnolia, VOD 7.1, theatrical 8.5) “offers fascinating color footage of the original 1964 coast-to-coast bus trip of Ken Kesey‘s Merry Pranksters, and tells the legendary story more or less completely with two glaring exceptions.

“One, there’s no mention whatsoever of Tom Wolfe or his book that almost single-handedly sculpted the Kesey/magic bus legend, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” And two, there’s only one mention of the word ‘enlightenment’ in the whole film and no down-deep discussion at all of what LSD did to and for people during the early to late ’60s. The latter strikes me as borderline surreal given that LSD was the prime catalyst for the spiritual revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s.”

How do you make a doc about the bus without at least mentioning Wolfe’s book, by any standard the definitive account in the same way that John Reed‘s “Ten Days That Shook The World” told the story of the 1917 Russian revolution? And how could Gibney not explore to at least some degree the currents churned up by LSD, which was indisputably the biggest influence upon artist-youth-spiritual seeker culture of the ’60s in a thousand different ways and wound up influencing damn near everything?

Magic Trip is basically about new footage of the bus trip — that and very little else. Imagine some magical circumstance by which images of Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples had been visually captured or rendered in some immediate, first-hand way and then preserved and assembled for a documentary, and then the filmmaker decided to more or less ignore the fact that what these thirteen men did and said just over 2000 years ago in Judea resulted in a minor little thing called Christianity.

My Air France flight landed at Paris Charles DeGaulle airport at 5:55 am. I couldn’t bring myself to take Ambien for fear of a black-dog hangover, and so I bagged about 90 minutes’ sleep, if that. The flight to Nice is just about to leave. I’m tapping this out on the iPhone from seat #22D.

I can’t embed links but Pirates of the Caribbean received its first bad review from the Guardian. Arnold and Maria Schwarzenegger are separating. Rod Lurie is directing a hostage thriller. Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny is on my Nice flight and in fact sitting one row in front of me.

My Air France flight to Paris leaves four and a half hours from now so it’s time for re-packing and hitting the bank and last-minute whatevers before taking the A train out to JFK. Thanks very much, Air France, for not offering on-board wifi. (If shlubby-shleppy Delta can offer it, why not they?) As far as I understand they don’t even offer AC plug-ins for computers and phones…nice. I might manage a couple of final posts from the airport lounge before the plane leaves, but then again maybe not.

Flight #23 will arrive in Paris at midnight New York time. That’ll mean trying to get some sleep when my mind and body won’t especially be in the mood. To alleviate this I’ll be taking Ambien for the first time in my life. The Paris-to-Nice flight arrives at 2:55 am Manhattan time.

After reading Jonathan Alter‘s Vanity Fair profile of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (“Woman of the World,” June issue), I’ve decided that it’s time to completely bury my Hillary-hating attitude from the ’08 primary campaign and to support her for President in 2016, when she’ll only be 68. It’s way past time for a female chief exec, and there’s no one tougher or more experienced than she.

I was talking yesterday with Jett about creating a Hollywood Elsewhere iPad2 app. “Forget it — it’s not necessary and you can’t afford it,” he said. But a voice is telling me I can’t stand still and that I have to move into the iPad2 realm. “The site is fine as it is,” he replied. “The site is totally fine. It has a voice and a niche. You don’t need to do this.”

But with a larger iPad format I could introduce a permanent link to all the Oscar Poker podcasts with fast links to each one. “Okay,” he said. “I like the podcast. I listen to it every weekend.” And I could add a feature that highlights the best quotes and most popular stories at the end of every week. “You should do that for the site right now,” he replied. And I could compile a section that links to all articles that cover classic or otherwise older films on Bluray and DVD over the last 12 years. (In October I’ll have been doing an online column for 13 effing years.) And I could finally scan all the L.A. Times and Entertainment Weekly print articles from the ’90s and load them according to date, movie, topic or what-have-you.

“All good ideas but again, you can make these happen for the site right now,” Jett said. “But forget an iPad2 app. Designers cost way too much and you’d need a lot of daily maintenance.” I’m not so sure I have a choice, I said, no matter how hard or expensive it might be.

Fox Home Video’s Bluray of Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler, an absolute essential, streets on May 17th. Monochrome Scope (2.39 to 1) is the format for me so I don’t have a choice in the matter. I won’t have a chance to see it until I return from France at month’s end (hello, James Finn!) but here’s a just-posted DVD Beaver review.

I’m saying right now that I’m not especially looking forward to Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s The Kid With The Bike, which is playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. For one thing I don’t like movies about red-haired kids with high-pitched voices who wear red T-shirts. I don’t much care for movies about kids, period. I once had a place in my heart for this kind of thing but no longer. Especially with kids like this in the lead. I’m just being honest.

I have news for all young kids dealing with absent or abusive parents. Life is hard so you may as well grim up and deal with it and stop trying to make me empathize with your plight. I can tell you stories about my own messed-up childhood that’ll tear your heart out.

A few weeks ago I wrote the great Albert Brooks and offered to do what I could to heighten awareness of his new book, “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America.” I suppose if I’d really wanted to help I would have written the St. Martin’s Press publicist and gone from there, right? Except book publicists are sketchy people these days with the book industry in decline, and it seemed somehow simpler to write Brooks because we’ve spoken a couple of times and he knows the column, etc.

Brooks completely ignored me. I might as well have been an assistant book editor from an obscure Riverside County alternative weekly. But let’s turn the other cheek and offer a portion of a Proust q & a with Brooks in the online Vanity Fair.

VF: What is your idea of perfect happiness? Brooks: Not sure what happiness means. Need to look that up. VF: What is your greatest fear? Brooks: That three days before I die I’ll find out what happiness means. VF: Which historical figure do you most identify with? Brooks: Pete Best. VF: Which living person do you most admire? Brooks: You don’t know him.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the one 70mm film I’ve never seen on DVD or in a theatre. Reason #1: I’ve never cared. Reason #2: Any film starring Dick Van Dyke is verboten on general principle. When and if the original car sells for $2 million, the buyer will be a rich Arab in his 50s or 60s.