Your first reactions to a film are happening within two or three minutes. General impressions start to coalesce and coagulate after 15 or 20 minutes. Your opinions are usually pretty clear at the 30-minute mark, and you know what this movie is 45 to 60 minutes in. So whatever you’re tweeting as you leave the theatre has been kicked around a bit. So I never regret them, although it’s always more satisfying and revealing to deliver a fleshed-out review.

I was denied admittance to the 2 pm screening of Brandon Cronenberg‘s Antiviral at the Salle Debussy. Me and about 150 or 200 others. My pink-with-a-yellow-pastille pass always gets me in at the last minute, but hordes of buyers pushed their way into this showing. Festival press liason Gerald Duchassoy estimates that buyers took up one-third of the seats. Tonight’s 10:15 pm screening will also be rough, he cautions.

I’ve got 40 minutes before Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral begins at 2 pm. It’s about “biological communion” with celebrities, as somebody tweeted a day or two ago. Or more precisely about an employee at a clinic that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. I have a funny feeling about this but better to encounter and respond than sit here in the Orange press longe, tapping out pissy little paragraphs.

I saw John Hilcoat‘s Lawless this morning — a bootlegging movie about backwoods macho bludgeoning, stabbing, gouging, shooting, throat-slitting, shotgunning and all that good exploitation yeehaw crap. It’s a better acted, more finely photographed and much more violent upgrade of an early ’70s Roger Corman film. So why did they screen it here? It’s a drive-in movie for rednecks, and I’m sitting in Grand Palais on the Cote d’Azur watching this flotsam?

It’s set in 1931, the height of the Depression, and I guess I wanted something classy and fabled like Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox…no such luck with Hillcoat. Tom Hardy plays a time-travelling robot with a hick accent who can’t be killed with a throat-slashing or with two or three shots to the chest…he jes keeps on a’comin.

As far as I’m concerned Hillcoat is no longer someone to watch. He’s a thick-fingered plebe. The Proposition, for me, was crude, sadistic, high-style hash about amber lighting and grubbily dressed actors whose faces were smeared with chicken grease. The Road, his post-apocalyptic father-son movie, was half-decent but was mostly about compositions filled with grayness and ash and waste of one kind or another. And now this sludge.

“Two good things about Lawless,” I tweeted. “(1) Guy Pearce‘s ultra-venal, almost Dracula-like villain, and (2) a nice nude scene featuring Jessica Chastain.”

I got into an 11:30 am market screening of Pablo Lorrain‘s No, which has more heat than any festival selection so far. It’s about an advertising campaign in Chile, largely sculpted by an ad man played by Gael Garcia Bernal, that led to the unseating of the fascist thug Augusto Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite election, and the introduction of democracy.

Unfortunately the print shown had only French subtitles, and the film is naturally in Spanish. I was able to understand some of it but not enough, and I finally split after 45 minutes or so. I’d naturally like to catch an English-subtitled version. The film is shot in 1.33 with what looks like a 1980s video camera, so it looks like a period piece — an odd term for a film set 24 years ago but whatever.

On Friday afternoon I was granted some brief beachside time with Moonlight Kingdom director-cowriter Wes Anderson. It turned out pretty well, I think. Apologies for my Canon camera doing an abrupt switch-off at the ten-minute mark.

In my book Sean Penn didn’t “explode” or even get angry, not really, when he said that “the whole fucking world has abandoned Haiti.” He was just emphasizing a fact with the use of a normal, no-big-deal f-bomb. The way he’s speaking in this video clip (taken by myself) is more characteristic of the tone of yesterday afternoon’s press conference, held to promote last night’s benefit carnival for Haiti.

“It’s not only celebrities who went for a day,” Penn said in the press conference room inside the Grand Palais . “It’s the whole fucking world. It’s all of you.”

I asked about Haiti fatigue and the general feeling that God has been cruel to Haiti and that nothing ever seem to work there democracy-wise or decency-wise. Everything about Haiti connotes despair and futility. Penn said that “the reason we have Haiti fatigue is because there was never a commitment in the first place.”

I’ve never felt much rapport with Will Smith (his surface-skimming, auto-pilot sense of humor, conservative movie choices, Scientology) but yesterday’s incident at the Moscow premiere of Men in Black 3 was okay. A Ukranian TV reporter reportedly “notorious for kissing celebrities” tried to punk Smith with a kiss on the mouth, and Smith shut him down and gave him the back of his hand. And I got that.

Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills screened at the Salle Debussy twice this evening, at 7 and 10 pm. I caught the 7pm with a capacity crowd. It’s an intensely austere, moralistic, monastic and harsh-atmosphere thing with repressed Sapphic undertones and all kinds of authoritarian foulness and constipation. The slowly building film observes the tyranny of religion and considers the inevitable result of trying to keep long-building steam from escaping the pot.

Mungiu’s screenplay is based upon a 2006 book called “Deadly Confession” by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, which is based on true events. Boiled down, it’s about love denied and an improvised exorcism gone wrong. It’s about two female friends, Voiochita and Alina (Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur), who grew up together and became lovers in an abusive state orphanage, and who are reunited when Alina comes to visit Voichita, who has become a nun at a remote and highly primitive convent in rural Romania.

It’s basically about Alina wanting Voichita to be her lover again and perhaps even get her to abandon the convent and leave with her, and when Voichita refuses it’s about Alina deciding she wants also to submit to the discipline and denial of a monastic life but not really — she just wants to cling to Voichita under any circumstance. These currents are soon decipherable, of course, and the priest and the nuns to what they can to head them off at the pass if not squelch them, and eventually things turn manic and loony and then violent. It all turns out very badly.

Tweet summary: “Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond The Hills is a long, somewhat downerish Bresson film about faith, blockage, monastic ritual and denial, love, insanity, eroticsim, exorcism & the evil one. Very austere, muffled and forbidding. Vaguely creepy, chilly, very slow and deliberate. Disturbing but it doesn’t really pay off. And yet it sort of does. Could or would the ascetic Bresson have made Beyond The Hills? And if he had, would his God have been pleased, angry or non-plussed?”

It’s very well acted by everyone, top to bottom. I believed every second of it.

When the 7pm show came to an end two or three people mooed. Not booed but mooed like cows in the field. I’ve heard boos in Cannes before and these were not that.

As much as I loathe Mitt Romney, it doesn’t seem fair to try and beat him up for mentioning Adolf Hitler in a strictly anecdotal way during a speech five years ago. He referred to Hitler having turned to liquified coal when his oil reserves were running out in the final stages of World War II. Not that liquified coal is a good idea, but Romney never said “one thing Hitler did right.” This is all about his having said Adolf’s name…that’s all.

The Paperboy doesn’t screen here until next Thursday…jeez. Okay, fine. Six days here feels like three in other places. Everything starts to flow and bleed and mix into everything else, like one huge pot of gumbo. Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills starts in nine minutes. That’s it…shutdown.

Ben Stiller is here in Cannes to promote Madagascar 3, but I’ve read that he’s also lending his name and presence to tonight’s Haiti Cannes fundraiser. I wrote him a half-hour ago asking what his involvement is, and he responded as follows:

“Sean Penn and Paul Haggis have done extensive work in Haiti over the last two to three years. Both JPHRO and AFH are organizations that take the attiude of their founders, which is ‘just get it done.’ Our art auction ‘Artists For Haiti’ back in September (in collaboration with gallerist David Zwirner and generous donations of art from artists like Marllene Dumas, Chris Offili, Luc Tuymans, Neo Rauch, Jeff Koons and Ed Ruscha), raised about $13.7 million and a lot of it went to fund APJ and JPHRO.

“From school buildings to cholera clinics to rubble removal, these organizations are commited to helping Haitians help themselves to a better future. And one thing that people should know is that Haggis and Penn are not dilletantes. They are there and on the ground in a very real way, doing the work.”

Excellent pieces about what it’s like to struggle in the Cannes trenches have been written by MSN Hitlist columnist James Rocchi and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. I was going to excerpt Sasha’s Cannes Diary, Day #1 piece yesterday but the moment passed so here’s Cannes Diary, Day #2. (She’s taking excellent photos besides.) And here’s an excerpt from Rocchi’s article, which just went up:

“You could, theoretically, spend hundreds, if not thousands of Euros here daily — a decent upscale meal starts at 18 Euros, and the exchange rate is stiff. But as a member of the press, you try and conserve your cash. Do you go with the only-in-certain-area?s free wi-fi provided by Euro-telecom Orange, or do you shell out the equivalent of $140 for the works-anywhere pay version? [Wells insert: I bought the $140 wifi yesterday and it’s worth its weight in gold.]

“How much free Nespresso can you drink in lieu of paying three times the everyday price for a regular cup of American joe? Just how many people can share a rental flat without going mad like some cruel sociological experiment?

“Worse than the expenses is the cost of time. How early do you have to line up to get into a film you want to (or, if assigned to review, need to) see? Can you put 20 minutes between two films 200 feet apart, or will you be shut out? How can you combine trying to see 3, 4 films a day while not going mad and still having time to write something, anything. The press badges are prioritized by color — Orange, Yellow, Blue, Pink, Pink with a dot (‘Rose et pastill’) and White — and, trust me, this is the time you do want to be Mr. Pink.”