The great Guillermo del Toro, director of the extremely well-received Pan’s Labyrinth, following our Martinez Hotel chat — Friday, 5.25.06, 12:15 am.

(a) (l. to r.) Lying‘s Jena Malone, director M. Blash, Chloe Sevigny, director Gus Van Sant at a post-screening dinner at Indochine, where the most elegant and gastronomically pleasurable affair of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival was hosted last night — Thursday, 5.25, 10:50 pm; (b) Spread from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro’s note-and-sketch journal, from which he wrote the screenplay and used to draw the first images of monsters and phantoms from the film — snapped in the Martinez Hotel lobby on Thursday, 5.25, 11:35 pm; (c) Another spread from the del Toro workbook — Thursday, 5.25.06, 11:36 pm; (d) French film scholar and author Michel Ciment and director Sydney Pollack during a “Master Class” interview with Pollack at the Salle Bunuel — Thursday, 5.25.06, 5:15 pm; George Clooney cappucino ad in Wednesday’s print edition of the Herald Tribune;
A marginal lack of press enthusiasm over Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth was indicated, I thought, by three nearly empty rows in the Salle de Presse prior to the Truth press conference earlier this week. Many journalists attended and much coverage resulted, but there were no empty seats during the X-Men 3 press conference.