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.

Yesterday morning I blew off the 8:30 am screening of Mike Leigh‘s Another Year in order to catch Shit Year — bad call as it turned out. So I’ll be catching it today at a Salles des Soixantieme make-up screening, although I know not precisely when. The Cannes website does a superb job of keeping the schedule hidden from those who lack the skills of a master web detective.

36 hours ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, who’s doing Cannes for the first time, wrote the following: “Cannes smells like coffee, cigarettes and the sea. On days where it’s bright and warm, you are caught with brief glimpses of the white caps in the waves and the reflection of the sun on their surface. Those are the moments you wish you were sipping good rose on someone’s yacht, dressed in flowing white linen and watching the peons mill around on shore.

Wall Street 2 star Shia Lebeouf a couple of days ago.

“What I see mostly are tired, hard-working journalists hunched over their laptops tapping out reviews or stories, and photographers resting their gigantic chunks of lens and plastic near their computer as they upload the many shots they got of the talent — it doesn’t matter to them that much whether it was a movie star or [not].

“The photographers wait wherever the talent will be coming through the door or walking down a corridor — but it is never so frenzied as it is surrounding a high profile movie like Robin Hood or, even more so, Wall Street 2. I suspect the Woody movie will be even more intense. And not just because the Woodman will bring with him a spectacular looking cast but because he’s Woody — a mythic figure.

“You will not find a nicer group of folks than those who work as the staff here.

They are so pleasant and helpful. If they have to tell you something more than that, they just chatter at you in French without asking whether or not you speak the language. And then you stand there, confused until the message is made clear with a pantomime or a drawing. They have not lost patience with any of us yet.

“Last night, I spent a few hours chatting with In Contention‘s Guy Lodge — a charmer, to be sure. After a few drinks with Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells we found our way down to the beach where the public screenings (open to anyone) debuted with From Here to Eternity. It was uncharacteristically cold, however, so we could only stand there for a bit — even with the rose and beer warming our blood it was too much. Montgomery Clift, though. Montgomery Clift.”

The Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips and the L.A. Times‘ Steven Zeitchik “offer their breakdown on the opening of the Cannes Film Festival and the drama that lies ahead, in the first of a series of videos from the south of France,” etc. They were asking me about upload problems late yesterday afternoon at the American Pavillion. I guess they sorted ’em out.

Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job, which screened early this afternoon, is a highly absorbing, meticulously composed hammer doc about the causes of the ’08 financial meltdown. Most of us have some kind of understanding of the whys and wherefores, but Ferguson lays it all out like a first-class table setting and makes this titanic crime seem extra vivid.

The American public was robbed blind and is still being made to suffer by an arrogant den of thieves, and the enormity of their power-corridor hustle is almost too vast and labrynthian to comprehend. But Ferguson’s doc makes it more comprehensible than in any presentation I’ve seen thus far. And yet as sharp and hard-bullet as it is, Inside Job doesn’t provide any release or crescendo. How could it? The bad guys are still running the show, etc. It mainly made me grind my teeth.

Every Average Joe and tea-bagger needs to see this film at least twice and take notes each time. (Or at least read the press notes.) Will they? Of course not. Inside Job will only play to the educated liberal urbans — the only social class that’s even half-inclined to spend ticket money on documentaries.

Inside Job is brilliant, perceptive, very well organized, necessarily angry or at least confrontational, and narrated by Matt Damon. And great looking — the gleaming, superbly lighted, crystal-clear lensing by Kalyanee Mann and HE pally Svetlana Cvetko is easily the most handsome and lustrous I’ve seen at the festival so far.

The problem is that none of Inside Job feels especially jolting. It is basically content to “get it right” and “tell it better,” which is more than enough for me. But will that be enough for at the attention deficit disorder crowd?

It delivers, in any event, a clear, razor-sharp portrait of a gang of blue-chip ogres and world-class motherfuckers (Summers, Paulson, Greenspan, Geitner, etc.), starting with their initial unleashing during the Reagan-era deregulating and moving through a litany of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 sign-offs, conflict-of-interest corruptions, revolving-door deals and mutually beneficial handjobs.

Too many billions were available, they all got greedy and created games and schemes in order to line their pockets, and here we are. And Barack Obama hasn’t done jack about restraining this culture since taking office.

But unlike No End in Sight‘s bracing explanations of American cockups in Iraq, there’s not much in Inside job that feels especially new or surprising. It’s really quite wonderful how it explains the most destructive mass robbery in history in such a clean and concise fashion. But I fear that it’s arrived too late. If it had been shown at last year’s Cannes festival, or even at last September’s Toronto festival, it obviously would have felt more vital or timely. And yet it’s very, very good for what it is.

Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is powered by dark whimsy. Set in London, it’s a mildly amusing, somewhat chilly film with no piercing performances or dramatic highlights even, as if everything and everyone is on a regulator of some kind. And yet the undertone has a steady and persistent misanthropic flavor. And it leaves you with a kind of “uh-huh, okay” feeling at the end.

Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, which screened at 11:30 this morning in Cannes.

It’s not a bust — there’s food for thought and reflection — but it’s not my idea of enlivening material.

The film is about people making terrible or lamentable choices and missing opportunities and hoping for something more or better and struggling with inevitable limitations. In short, it’s about what a sad bunch of clueless, desperate and delusional schmucks we all are.

It therefore has a certain integrity. But it feels middling or, truth be told, minor. It has irony, obviously, but not the delicious Match Point kind. There’s a solemn God’s-eye perspective at work here, but there’s no kick to it. We’re driven by longing and dreams but things don’t always work out. We want what we want but we get what fate doles out. Plop.

I don’t want to go out on a limb, but You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger doesn’t deliver my idea of what most moviegoers are looking for, or are likely to enjoy. I’d have to be goaded into seeing it again. It’s grade-C Woody….sorry.

That means it’s a bit less than Cassandra’s Dream, slightly better than Scoop or Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Anything Else, and in roughly the same realm as Another Woman, September, Shadows and Fog and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Then again (and I say this almost every time I review one of his films) a grade-C Woody is like a B-minus or even a B along the general curve.

For me, Cam Archer‘s Shit Year is a stew of pretentious monochrome murk. It’s one of those narrative-defying, interior landscape art-wanks that younger directors sometimes make in order to get the attention of the art-wank crowd — producers, other directors, art-gallery owners and journalists who delight in embracing difficult fare.

Luke Grimes, Ellen Barkin in Cam Archer’s Shit Year.

It seems to be an attempt to live in the misty, disoriented head of an older retired actress (Ellen Barkin) as she…well, as she does very little. Is having an affair with a good-looking 20something actor (Luke Grimes) of any interest or consequence? Is submitting to some form of new-age bullshit therapy of any interest or consequence? And what about the dead rat she finds outside her cabin? (“I’m not picking that up!”) And what’s with that constant whine of a nearby wood-chipper?

I don’t know. I’m not sure that I care. I’m feeling a bit misty and murky-minded. I guess it’s catching.

The first couple of walk-outs happened about 15 minutes in. People weren’t soon walking out in droves, but they did continue body by body. Some, I noticed, decided to take naps. Myself among them, to be perfectly frank. When I woke up I noticed that Roger Friedman, who’d been sitting across the aisle, had left. So had several others. So I stuck it out for another 15 or 20 minutes, and then I slipped out myself.

This movie needs a friend. It needs a mother. It needs a psychotherapist. It needs a job, or at least (like Barkin’s listless character) a sense of purpose. It needs to rob a bank or maybe get into a foot race through a construction site, or…whatever, take some kind of mood-elevating medication. All I know for sure is that Shit Year is a fizzle and a drizzle.

I’m now sitting in the Grand Lumiere and waiting for Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger to begin. I can’t wait for the new juice.