My reaction to Stephen Frears‘ Tamara Drewe, which screened this afternoon at the Salle Bunuel, was immediate and unambiguous — I hated it. It’s one of those satires of a form (i.e., romantic fiction) that doubles back and has it both ways by satirizing and playing it “straight,” or straight enough so that romantic fiction fans can themselves double-track by enjoying the cliches at face-value while having a good laugh or snicker. Everybody wins…except people like me.

Gemma Arterton in Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe.

Boiled down, Tamara Drewe is (a) a comedy by a hip director that’s aimed (whether its backers admit it or not) at intellectually-challenged women of whatever age who read fashion and gossip magazines and older chump-level couples, and (b) a glossy calling-card movie by a director who’s getting on and would like the producers of crap movies to know that he can do “obvious” and “unsubtle” as well as the next guy.

It’s important to absorb Tamara Drewe in the right “insincere” context. It’s first and foremost an adaptation of Posy Simmonds‘ weekly comic-strip serial of the same name, which itself is a modernized, “insincere” adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s “Far From The Madding Crowd.” (Simmonds’ complete work appeared in hardcover in 2007.)

Hardy’s novel was about three fellows vying for the affections of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (played by Julie Christie in John Schlesinger’s 1967 film) — a brawny, whiskered man-of-the-soil type (Alan Bates), an older gentleman of property (Peter Finch), and a dashing mustachioed heartbreaker (Terence Stamp). A lot of horseshit happens, but she winds up with Farmer John at the end.

Frears has the astonishingly empty and generally worthless Gemma Arterton (soon to appear in Prince of Persia) playing Tamara Drewe, an updated Everdene who stirs the hearts and loins of three fellows when she arrives at a writers’ retreat in an English country village. (The film was shot in, around or near Dorset.) Tamara is a newspaper columnist who comes from the area, when she was mildly homely due to an enormous honker. Then she got a nose job, making herself into quite the beauty and yaddah yaddah.

The Bates role is played by Luke Evans, the Finch role by Roger Allam, and the Stamp role by Dominic Cooper.

All I could think as I watched Tamara Drewe was “what a piece of empty unfunny synthetic crap this is.” The fact that it’s satirizing other works that are genuinely, sincerely and wholeheartedly crappy as opposed to being ironically crappy is of no interest to me. I only know that I was in pain.

Frears is generally regarded as a first-rate director who lacks a particular visual or stylistic signature, and who goes where the material takes him. But I found it appalling nonetheless that the director of Bloody Kids, The Hit, High Fidelity, The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liasons and Prick Up Your Ears could make a film as icky and over-scored and postcard-vapid as Tamara Drewe, even with such values being rendered “in quotes.”

The digital loading rates are slow as usual in the Orange cafe (my video was converted to mp4, but You Tube won’t even appear) and now I have to get myself to the 1 pm screening of Stephen Frears‘ Tamara Drewe, which starts in 23 minutes.

At the start of this morning’s Biutiful press conference — 5.17, 11:19 am.

5.17, 11:59 am.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful, which ended about fifteen minutes ago, is a sad, deeply touching hard-knocks, lower-depths drama in the tradition (or along the lines, even) of Roberto Rosselini‘s Open City or Vittorio DeSica‘s The Bicycle Thief. How’s that for high praise out of the gate?

Set among the poor and deprived in Barcelona, it’s about love and caring and continuity and carrying on among those who have it toughest, and dealing with guilt and tradition and the approaching of death and all the rest of the stuff that we all carry on our backs.

Every actor is exactly right and spot-on in this film, but Javier Bardem gives a truly magnificent performance in the title role of an illegal migrant labor and street-vendor manager-facilitator. He looks right now like the most likely winner of the festival’s Best Actor award just as Biutiful itself seems well-positioned right now to take the Palme D’Or.

It starts out brilliantly, and then slips into a longish character-introducing, character-building, filling-in-the-details phase that goes on for a 90 minutes or so, and then — bit by bit, and then in increasing increments — it starts to emotionally kick in. And that’s when I knew it was delivering something special.

I have to stop writing because the press conference is just starting.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful will screen in 22 minutes and I haven’t left the apartment yet. Some believe that the Barcelona-set drama with Javier Bardem is the last best hope of the festival for a serious home run.

My eldest son Jett graduated last weekend from Syracuse University with a major in journalism. The photos arrived this morning. I regret not having been there.

After my Ellen Barkin encounter I went to Lucy Walker‘s Countdown to Zero, a doc about the proliferation of armed nuclear devices, but didn’t see it due to the flu-like thing that’s been taking hold within. I promptly went under. Sharon Waxman will confirm this as she was sitting right beside me.

Will you look at that slightly stooped-over posture? Like a mailman at the end of the day. An ex-girlfriend told me a few weeks bacjk to sit up straight and stand up straight. Now I get what she meant. There’s nothing cool or soulful in slouching or stooping. Stand hard and tall like a Marine, or stand not at all.

Being too shagged to write and needing a late afternoon time-filler, I went to a second showing of Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job, and it was no less crisp or brilliant or urgent for that. I was allowed to sit in an elite reserved row, five or six seats down from Sony Classics co-honchos Michael Barker and Tom Bernard. And then Oliver Stone arrived at the last minute and sat right next to me.

I was in that same depleted mode, of course, but I didn’t nod off — a credit to the quality of the film, I suppose.

I tried to write a bit more and failed. And then I bought some groceries, and stumbled back to the apartment. I flopped down on the couch and promptly went out. I woke up shivering at 2 am — no blanket, lying there in my clothes, shoes still on — and grabbed the blanket, which is heavy and slightly itchy, and went back out.

For me, Ellen Barkin, the star of Cam Archer‘s fairly dreadful Shit Year, is movie-star material. Which is why I sat in the front row with my camera and my computer and my touch of a fever at the American Pavillion’s panel area and waited to see her, even though she kept everyone waiting for nearly 40 minutes.

Ellen Barkin during this afternoon’s American Pavillion panel discussion of Shit Year, which was considerably delayed by Barkin’s tardiness.

Barkin, Shit Year director Cam Archer — 5.16, 12:55 pm.

Having missed yesterday’s 4 pm market showing of Taylor Hackford‘s long-delayed Love Ranch, I tried to get into this morning’s 10 am follow-up screening at the Olympia. But no dice — a publicist stopped me, explaining there was a “no press” policy. Even though they’ve begun to screen it for journalists back in Los Angeles, according to what an L.A. Times guy told me.

This morning’s interference obviously doesn’t prove that Love Ranch is a problem movie. It may not be. But if you were repping a really good film, would you tell your publicist to keep guys like me from seeing it in Cannes?

There is nothing lower than a third-act plot twist. I’m not saying they don’t work from time to time (obviously they do) but putting in an “aha!…didn’t see that one coming!” turnaround is the most tedious dramatic device imaginable. Because everyone uses them, and it’s gotten to the point that we know some kind of third-act twist is coming. If they weren’t so prolific it might be interesting to use one occasionally, but they’ve become an absolute requirement. And that has made them deadly.

It’s my sixth day of humping around Cannes, having arrived last Tuesday, and my system is starting to succumb to the 18-hour work days, as it’s done before at previous film festivals at this stage of the game. I don’t have a fever, but I’m on the cusp of succumbing to one. My body is telling me that it wants to do as little as possible and get, for the first time, a decent night’s sleep. (I’ve been making do with 5 1/2 to 6 hours so far.) So maybe I’ll do that.

After doing a few things, I mean. The American Pavillion Shit Year press conference at noon, Lucy Walker‘s Countdown to Zero at 1:30 pm, the Countdown press conference at 3:15 pm, and then a 5:45 pm screening of Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff. And then a quiet dinner and back to the pad. That’ll work.

Getting older is “a lousy deal,” Woody Allen said during yesterday’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger press conference (which I missed because I chose to see Inside Job instead, which began at the same time). “There is no advantage in getting older. I’m 74 now. You don’t get smarter, you don’t get wiser, you don’t get more mellow, you don’t get more kindly…nothing good happens.

“Your back hurts more, you get indigestion, your eyesight isn’t as good and you need a hearing aid. It’s a bad business getting older, and I would advise you not to do it if you can.”

And don’t believe what you see in the movies, he added. “[Getting older] doesn’t have a romantic quality. You know, elderly characters in movies like ‘Gramps’ or ‘Pop’ or ‘the backstage doorman’ or something. Better to be younger and get the girl.”

I was reminding myself this morning that it’s a sign of weak character to take long showers. Anyone who does this is a soft sister — a person looking to hide inside the warm amniotic fluid of his mother’s womb, which is what a nice hot shower feels like. This realization goes back to when I was in my early 20s. If I happened to notice that a roommate or some guy or girl who was staying over was taking ten- or twelve-minute showers (or worse), I would instantly write them off.

Those who take extra-long hot showers are the same people who take extra-long breaks or lunches in order to get away from office drudgery, or who hide away inside an alcoholic or nicotine or drug cave. Your average enterprising, disciplined, hard-working types take four- or five-minute showers, at the longest. If you’re really hard-core you’ve finished in less than three. No exceptions, no excuses — either you get it or you don’t.