I’ve just been flopping around today in my black suit. Flopping and filing. I can’t afford to eat anything except mozarella and tomato and lettuce sandwiches, so I’m loading up on the free cappucinos at the Orange Cafe. I like free things…freedom. I want everyone to be free. I’d like to free myself, actually.

There’s nothing much to do except say hello to friends and strangers, and hang out at the American Pavillion and see Lou Ye’s Summer Palace tonight at 9 pm. The DaVinci Code premiere is about an hour away, and the post-premiere party — which will probably be an emotionally muted affair, given the reviews — starts tonight at 11 pm at the Quiaz Laubeuf, Vieux Port Cannes, under the big pyramid.

Last year the American Pavillion had extended plug-in outlets on the floor near the tables so laptoppers could plug in and work for a long while, if needed. This year…no outlets. So unless you have a fully-charged battery that last a few hours there’s not much point in writing and posting there. I’m sorry to be the sorehead dart-thrower, but this kinda strikes me as unhelpful and ungracious. (I assume the decision not to offer plug-ins was deliberate, as a way of keeping journalists like myself from hogging the seats at the eating tables for too long.) Ah, well…there are plug-ins at the Orange Cafe and at the Palais press room, which have struck me this year as much warmer and folksier places to hang.

One other thing: the free computers at the American Pavillion all have European keyboards. How do you type the @ sign again? How? Which key do I hit? Maybe Julie Sisk and her partners are trying to encourage American journalists to be less xenophobic and get with the European sensibility, etc. You can eventually be fluent with European keyboards, but until that happens it takes you 75% more time to write stuff.

I finally crashed at 3 ayem Wednesday. I guess I needed the rest because I slept right through my triple-alarm system and didn’t wake until just before noon, which caused me miss the 1 pm DaVinci Code press conference and before that the 11 ayem press screening of Paris Je’taime. I met the Daily Mail ‘s Baz Bamigboye and Fox 411’s Roger Freidman just after the press conference in the Palais stairway, and they both agreed the p.c. was dull and flat, like the movie. Film Stew’s Sperling Reich (whose site went down today from all the DaVinci Code review traffic) said the same thing. Tom Hanks didn’t want to be there, they all said…he looked drained. There was one direct question about the bad reviews, and it wasn’t answered but deflcted. DaVinci producer Brian Grazer thanked Friedman after the conference for panning the film in a kind way, i.e., less viciously than most critics.

“The thing to remember about the Cannes press, especially the film critics, is that they are global, sophisticated, pretentious and quite often vicious. They love to slam the seats at a press screening, or hiss a movie during the closing credits. That level of rejection did not occur [at Tuesday night’s DaVinci Code press screening]. But there were uncomfortable waves of titters throughout the film tonight, and when the BIG REVEAL comes, there was outright laughter.” — Anne Thompson on her RiskyBiz blog…and I have only this to add: Anne’s descriptions of the visiting Cannes press omits the fact that most of them are quite perceptive, selectively or otherwise. I’ve never known the Cannes gang to dump on a movie for the sheer perverse joy of dumping on a movie. If a movie has anything impassioned or startling or subversive to offer, somebody here will pick up on this and run it up the flagpole. But there’s nothing in The DaVinci Code that raised anyone’s temperature. It has one notable offering — Ian McKellen‘s 15-minute explanation scene (it’s nearly a soliloquy) of the biggest coverup of all time…but that’s it. All to say that the pans that came out of last night’s screening were not a result of temperament or pissy attitudes or predispostions.

This was first posted way back when, but it’s another great trailer re-scramble…very funny.

Three or four weeks after 9/11, Oliver Stone said during a New York Film Festival panel discussion that he’d “like to do a movie on terrorism…it would be like The Battle of Algiers…perhaps it’s an old formula, but if it were done realistically it could be a fascinating procedural.”

“You would see the Arab side,” Stone continued, “and you’d see the American side, and [if it’s done right] people will respond and they will go. I don’t buy this thing that everybody just wants to see Zoolander .” And now, some four years and eight months later, this still from Stone’s forthcoming World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) has hit the web and…well, what else is there to think? Obviously Stone still thinks of Ben Stiller‘s fashion-industry parody (which I half-liked as a film and really liked as a script) as an emblem of something puerile.

“The sound of failure is silence,” DreamWorks marketing maven Terry Press tells L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in one of his best pieces in a long while — a study of what it’s like, psychologically and emotionally, when your movie flops. “When you have a hit, your phone starts ringing at 6:45 a.m. and never stops,” says Press. “In failure, there is a deafening silence. No calls from distribution, no calls from journalists, no calls from the filmmakers. It’s the Hollywood version of bird flu. You feel like everyone is saying, ‘Get my mask out. I don’t want to be near any failure germs.’ Even your own relatives don’t call.”

Another here-comes-The DaVinci Code piece, with another look at how it’s being sold to Christians, hostile and otherwise…researched and written by Peter J. Boyer for The New Yorker.

Yes, yes…no one has seen The DaVinci Code yet and it’s very unusual for Columbia to hide it as they have, but they’ll be showing it here in Cannes about four and a half hours from now and the head-down marketing angle will obviously be moot after that. I’ll try and bang out some kind of a reaction piece as soon as I leave the Palais screening room (I think it’s the Debussy) at 11 pm or thereabouts, but I don’t know how lucid or well-phrased I’ll be at that hour. Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times piece says the first-weekend projections “range from $70 million to over $100 million,” so if it makes $60 or $65 million that will be seen as a shortfall.