One of the reasons it took so long to get rolling today in Cannes (apart from being occupied this morning with seeing Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, a mystifying shortfall for a respected, world-class director and a full-on mediocrity that comes close to being a rank embarassment) is the absurd wi-fi situation at the American Pavillion and, for what I’ve been told, inside the Grand Palais press room also.

Everyone with a badge has been given a five-digit user ID and a three-digit password, and none of them work. But the AMPAV tech-head volunteers have a list of five-digit and three-digit codes that do work…as long as nobody else tries to log on with the same numbers. Except everyone at the American Pavillion is going up to these volunteers and asking for working code groups and using them, and every time a new person logs on with a given code it kicks off the previous person who used the same numbers.
Right now I’m connected with a 19585 user ID and an 871 password, but if somebody else comes along and logs on with these numbers, I’ll get kicked off. This has happened to me seven times within the past hour, and I in turn have kicked off seven oothers. It’s obviously insane all over here, and the situation won’t be fixed, I’m told, until later this afternoon, which is a euphemism, I’m sure, or sometime tonight or tomorrow morning.