Specifically, I am Box 1397, and people stuff me full of paper. After every screening at the Palais des Festivals, it’s customary to drop by the press boxes and see what new flyers, advertisements or magazines have been delivered by hopeful publicists. The boxes aren’t enormous – see photo – but I came back from today’s festivalgoing with the equivalent of the Toronto white pages in my bag. Not the kind of weight you want to lug around to five screenings, the press junket for Blindness and a seaside interview with Montréal director Denis Villeneuve, who’s here with an inventive little short called Next Floor. Oh, and to a spur-of-the-moment interview by a student documentary crew, for which I’ll post a link as soon as it goes online.

Fortunately, there are recycling bins everywhere in the press areas, and people are using them very efficiently: I saw one reporter simply pivot on his hip and dump the contents of his box out into a nearby bin in one swift, elegant movement.

I haven’t worked up the courage to do that yet; I’m afraid I might unwittingly toss out an invitation to a party. Of course, that would mean someone had invited me to a party, and that I had time to go.

Where was I? Oh, right, seeing movies. I’ve had the full range today, starting with Pablo Trapero’s grimy Leonera (“Lion’s Den”), about a pregnant woman who’s allowed to raise her child in prison while awaiting trial for the murder of the man who may have fathered him; great performance from Martina Gusman in the lead, but the script was patchier than I would have liked.

Next, there was Kung Fu Panda, which is much, much, much better than you might think – it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s visually sumptuous and I’d even go so far as to call it the first non-Pixar effort to approach that studio’s standard for fully realized characters and environments. This is a terrific kung-fu picture that just happens to use talking animals instead of human beings.

Third up was Three Monkeys, which has no monkeys in it at all; instead, it’s Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest grim drama, revolving around a family trying desperately to ignore at least two horrible truths gnawing away at their lives. It ain’t a crowd-pleaser – the pacing is grindingly slow, and Ceylan’s digitally tweaked palette takes its inspiration from a tobacco stain – but it does what it does very well.

Fourth and best of the day was Hunger, about which I expect you’ll be hearing a great deal before too long. An impressionistic drama about Bobby Sands’ 1981 hunger strike, it’s a devastating and defiantly non-partisan film that’s going to piss off some people by its refusal to stake out a moral position.

Finally, I closed the night with a screening of Tokyo!, a trio of short works by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon Ho set in the titular Japanese city. As you’d expect from these directors, the films are idiosyncratic and eccentric in equal measure – only Michel Gondry would tell a story in which a young woman realizes her destiny by becoming a chair – but they’re enjoyable enough as a lark.

Cannes fun fact: The seats in the Salle Debussy are equipped with little flip-up writing surfaces, such as those seen in university lecture halls. Nobody uses them, but they’re there.

One week after Hadag Nachash, an anti-terror Israeli hip-hop group, played the Israel@60 jam at Ricoh Coliseum, an anti-occupation Palestinian rap group called DAM rolls into El Mocambo tonight (Thursday, May 15).

The Israeli group was feted with a slick promotional push and big party, playing for a world leader in a giant downtown venue. Their Palestinian counterparts are slumming it for one night only in a Chinatown club with virtually no notice (unless you read Democracy NOW! Web updates).

Allegorical to their respective positions in the Middle East, no?

Further analysis (while being careful not to promote a hip-hop beef on top of the ongoing polical one) shows a few other interesting contrasts:

Hadag Nachash:

• Means 'snake fish' in Hebrew
• Received international attention for Sticker Song, which uses bumper-sticker slogans in Israel (“The Left Helps Arabs,” and “Don’t Give Them Weapons”)
• Endorsement (implicit?) from film producer and Israel@60 host Ivan Reitman

DAM:

• Means 'blood' in Arabic (and also 'Da Arabic Mcees' in English)
• Received international attention for Who’s the Terrorist?, a gritty song about perceived Israeli war crimes, the occupation and various invasions (posted above)
• Endorsement from Mountain Goats John Darnielle

If only they played the same night...

I am in Cannes, and it feels like I’m the only one here.

The rest of the assembled press, celebrities and cineastes are watching the opening night gala, Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness, so the Croisette is eerily silent. This is kind of cool, actually, since the film’s last movement includes a long sequence in which Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga and Danny Glover, among others, wander through a cityscape similarly emptied of people.

I have been awake now for 34 hours.

I’m not complaining. That’s just the price of crossing the Atlantic from west to east. But most of the time, when one does that, one doesn’t have to immediately stumble out of the massive Palais des Festivals complex – where, I might add, one has never been before in one’s life – onto a standing interview set and talk to CBC Newsworld about how great it is that Canada has a couple of dogs in this year’s Palme d’Or fight.

Do we, though? Is Blindness a contender, with its moody artistry tangled up in a metaphor that’s ultimately unfilmable? And does anyone short of Atom Egoyan’s publicist really think Adoration has a shot?

People don’t want to hear that stuff, though. So I bring up the issue of the strong American competition – Eastwood! Soderbergh! James Gray’s Two Lovers! Um, that Barry Levinson movie nobody liked at Sundance! – and that seems to mollify my interviewer.

There are lots of American films vying for the Palme this year, and notable American Sean Penn is the president of the jury. Therefore, if the Canadian films don’t win anything, it’s obviously a nationalistic snub. Unless a French film wins, in which case it’s a different kind of nationalistic snub.

Right. Whatever. Meanwhile, Blindness – which I think works really well for about half its running time, before it turns into a grotty, grown-up riff on Lord Of The Flies with a dollop of 28 Days Later – just got slammed in today’s Variety, which will probably work against its chances. Adoration doesn’t screen until next Thursday, after most of the other heavy hitters, so maybe Egoyan’s characteristic minimalism will seem like a breath of fresh air.

Basically, nobody knows anything. Just like the start of every other film festival I’ve ever attended, except this one has Cate Blanchett in the audience. And she’s gorgeous.

Cannes fun fact of the day: Werner Herzog has just announced plans to remake Abel Ferrara’s sleaze-tastic Catholic psychodrama Bad Lieutenant, with Nicolas Cage in the role previously essayed by a literally balls-out Harvey Keitel. I’m hallucinating, right? That can’t be real.

Five long-awaited Starbucks breakfast sandwiches made their Canadian debut Tuesday along with a sleek reheating oven and a bouquet of store-filling reduced-fat food smells.

The hot breakfasts arrive after a grande deal of controversy as to whether they would make it past the test markets and appear north of the border at all.

The concern, according to Bucks CEO Howard D. Schultz, was that the smell of bacon and eggs would overpower the coffee aroma, and that the upscale facade would give way to a fast-food atmosphere. There is still confusion as to why the sandwiches even came out in Toronto, since they will now presumably be de-emphasized in the near future.

But on the launch date, the breakfast fragrance was the least of worries.

With the introduction of the sandwiches comes with the Starbucks oven – remember all the sandwiches, cookies and baked goods were made off-site. So, with brand new, presumably untested machinery behind the counter, the Starbucks local to the NOW offices had a full-scale breakdown. None of the sandwiches could be heated.

But the staff still served me the Reduced-Fat Turkey Bacon, Cholesterol-Free Egg, Reduced-Fat White Cheddar Breakfast Sandwich (what a mouthful!) (literally!) anyway. And, to be honest, I was grateful for it.

I often find myself eating coffee cakes and lemon loaves at Starbucks on busy days, even though I mostly detest paying $6 for a coffee and a piece of bread. So the sandwich, even when it had to be reheated in my office microwave, was a welcome addition to my in-a-hurry diet.

But comparing foods like Peppered Bacon, Egg and Aged Cheddar Breakfast Sandwich (which I tried on a recent trip to the U.S.) to lemon loaves isn’t very helpful. So here are the sandwich specifics on the Turkey Bacon one: the whole wheat English muffin was cardboard-esque, the cheese went down unnoticed and the egg was, as fast-food eggs often are, standard.

The ingredients – for all their adjectives (classic sausage, aged cheddar) – seem the same pre-cooked food stuffs all the other restaurants get, only with a slight, high-end twist. (In this case, my sandwich was dressed up with reduced-fat turkey bacon. The Eggs Florentine sandwich wears baby spinach as it's haute ingredient.)

The key to enjoying the sandwich, which I did, is to remember that it is the breakfast sandwich lite and not the meaty, greasy, full-fat competition. Overall, yes, a little flimsy. But always nice to contrast the buttery, fat-dripping alternative at Tim Hortons, the gooey, homogenous McMuffin at McDonald’s, and, of course, the lemon loaves.

Three dead bodies pictured on the cover of the Globe & Mail - below the fold, so entire image isn't visible on newstands - tells the untidy story of the mass tragedy currently in Burma. It also proved too graphic for some.

On the same day this front page ran, an estimated 9,000 died in an earthquake in central China. So the question of whether or not the Globe continues with gritty, truth-spewing photos could be answered with the next few front pages.

BODY & SOUL by Judith Thompson (Dove). Runs to May 17, Tuesday and Thursday-Saturday 8 pm, matinees Saturday-Sunday and Wednesday 2 pm. $25. Young Centre for the Performing Arts (55 Mill). 416-866-8666.

Cooptation or triumph? That's what people want to know every time a major corporation steps in and does something explicitly feminist and that's what everyone was asking me last Saturday night at the opening of the Body & Soul show at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

Answer: triumph, definitely.

Body & Soul is the brainchild of the Dove corporation, that same company that's launched its Real Beauty campaign featuring advertisements with models whose faces look as if they have actually lived.

For Body & Soul, Dove hired playwright Judith Thompson to work with non-professional performers and develop a play about the experiences of real women. The women were selected through a rigorous audition process until there were 13 diverse characters left. Thompson listened to their stories, workshopped the piece and it’s playing through May 17 to sold-out houses.

The soulful show mines stories of struggle and empowerment in moving ways. There was not a single mention of the name Dove throughout the evening, even during the introduction and, it seems, no attempt to manipulate the content to reflect any predisposition to beauty products.

Whenever I'm asked about beauty companies coopting feminist ideas for advertising purposes I always say that I celebrate the phenomenon. Advertisements advertise two things – the product itself and some kind of underlying value, whether it's the nuclear family, a standard of beauty, consumerism in general, sex and violence or anything else.

Given that, any time a spot advertises a feminist value alongside its product I'm not going to complain.

In this case, a company selling beauty products didn't even sell anything during the show. True, each audience member received a swag bag containing three beauty products, all of them imbued with enough perfume to make me gag. And the soap bar was pink, for heaven's sake.

So, yes, Dove wants us all to be girly girls. But taken together with the response of the opening night audience to the powerful stories of diverse women, Dove's doing the right thing.

I'm telling you, if an organization like Supporting Our Youth (SOY) existed when I was 15, I would have exploded with happiness. I was a baby-dyke-in-progress with nobody to talk to about what I was going through. The 60s sexual revolution was really a game played out in a patriarchal boys club – don't be fooled by all that long hair – and it was fiercely heterosexual.

SOY gives support to queer youth via groups (for queers of colour, writers and those piritually inclined, to give just a few examples, counselling, drop-ins and a mentoring program (conflict alert – my partner runs it) and has been wildly successful, tapping into the GLBT community in amazing ways. 

SOY celebrated its 10th anniversary at a rockin' party at Circa last night (Thursday), complete with cool entertainment and fine food that got scarfed back by a diverse crowd.

Ryan G. Hinds was dazzling as the host for the evening's festivities, flashing hot sequins and a festive headdress. Hinds got his start at an early version of SOY's annual artist showcase Fruit Loopz and he's now a fully mature talent. He introduced speakers and performers who celebrated 10 years of dynamic work in the queer community and a 10-minute video about SOY directed by Sarah Sharkey Pearce. 

Hot performers included Evalyn Parry, whose persona as an Always sanitary napkin singing about the pleasures of getting insides women's pant sis a riot and Mata Dance, a troupe of Latin women dancers who  revved up the audience with some hot lesbo-style moves.

Proof of SOY's impact – Circa was rammed with all kinds of young queers by the time the DJs started spinning.

Send me comments if you've ever experienced the benefits of SOY programs.

The mindless whinging that followed in the papers and on the sports radio talk shows after this week’s firing of coach Paul Maurice just provided more evidence. As one headline aptly summed up – No GM, No Captain, No Coach... No Hope.

If is isn’t clear yet to the doofuses in Leaf Nation, those running the show at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment could care less what product they put on the ice, as long as there are dumb asses filling the seats. For MLSE the emphasis is on entertainment, not sports. And Richard Peddie and company provide more off-ice charades than a bad Benny Hill rerun. There are always bigger fish to fry, more fans to filch, for the big boys on the board.

Lately, its been the much-rumoured purchase of Sheffield soccer club of the English Premiership. MLSE, it seems, is done playing footsies when it comes to the beautiful game, now that their small investment in Toronto FC – helped by a sweetheart deal from the city – is paying huge dividends.

Not on the pitch, of course, but that’s not the point.

Whether it’s hockey, basketball or soccer, in this town mediocrity for the masses will do. It’s all about marketing. Keeping alive the illusion that things, no matter how pathetic, are looking up, moving forward – even if those names most mentioned as the next hires to take the Maple Laughs over the top – if they can make the playoffs first – are tired retreads from yesteryear. See Pat Burns. See Cliff Fletcher. Haven’t we read this script before? Maybe we should put Tie Domi on the MLSE board. Wait, we may be too late. Ah the nostalgia. Poor Leafs fans have been sucking on that one for 40-plus Stanley Cup-less years and counting.

Things I learned at California Cruisin’, the Sante Wine Festival's Golden State-themed wine tasting at the ROM:

• If you’re trying different wines, rinse your glass between tastings with either a little drop of the wine you’re about to try or nothing at all. Water is a worse pollutant than another wine.

• Francis Ford Coppola makes a good wine.

• The ROM is becoming my favourite place to party. I often enjoy jams at Casa Loma during TIFF, but mingling with beverages is much more exciting when there’s a giant Buddha in the room.

• Very few people know where Napa Valley is.

• One should be leery of anything that’s labelled “table wine.” It tends to be “low-grade” and “pedestrian,” but good for sangria or to bring to a party.

• Brie cheese should not be served chilled.

• It’s legal to order a batch of wine from a winery representative.

• Each wine at a tasting tends to have its own business card.

• Oka cheese was first made by the Trappist monks in the 19th century.

• In describing wines or cheeses, feel free to overuse the words “exquisite” and “elegant.” Everyone else does.

• It’s very difficult to not sound pompous when talking about aromas of gently crushed grapes or the nuances of lingering oak tastes.

• Paul Dolan, of the organic-friendly Mendocino Wine Company, promotes sustainable farming practices, uses solar and wind energy, and does not harm trees when he puts labels on his wines. He also can give wine presentations without notes.

• Robert Craig is of no relation to James Bond actor Daniel Craig.

• Virgin now has its logo on bottles of wine. No explanation was given as to why.

• I really disliked that movie Sideways. Hated it, even. This isn't so much learning as it is remembering.

J’ENTENDS PLUS LA GUITARE (Philippe Garrel). 95 minutes. Subtitled. Screens Friday (May 9) and Saturday (May 10) at 7 pm at Jackman Hall.
Rating: NNNN

The first movement of J’Entends Plus La Guitare takes a little getting used to; Philippe Garrel’s 1991 semiautobiographical reminiscence of his on-and-off affair with Velvet Underground singer Nico has the static framing and measured pace of a storyteller on the nod. And that’s as it should be, since the characters’ drug habit is both an enabler and symptom of their codependent relationship.

And once you get into its rhythms, the film is as seductive as the blonde Marianne (Johanna Ter Steege), the enigmatic, mercurial woman who bewitches Benoit Regent’s Gérard, the Garrel surrogate who glumly endures the phases of her interest. When she’s fully present in their relationship, he’s slightly less mopey than usual, and willing to discuss philosophy with his friends; when her affections fade out, he retreats into himself – and a succession of other women.

It’s all very glum and very French, and Garrel does flirt with self-parody in letting his characters sulk so profoundly for so long, especially once they start snorting heroin. But by that point – hopefully – we’ve already fallen into their rhythms, and are invested in their situation. Basically, if you don’t run screaming from the theatre at the “bathroom intimacy” scene - which was probably shocking in its bluntness in 1991 but now feels awfully precious – you’ll find much here to appreciate.