Trade Tidbits, Wandering Around

I head over to the American Pavilion. I've never even walked in there before, but a persistent email prompted me to register and see what they had to offer. Guarding the door was a gang of teenagers -- maybe high school, maybe college. They're all wearing green t-shirts and direct you where to go en masse. Imagine getting to come to Cannes when you're in high school or just in college. What a blast.

Woody Allen's next movie is going to be made in London again. The trades say it was scheduled to be shot in Paris; I remember it being Spain. In any case, it will cost $20.8 million, stars Ewan mcGregor and Colin Farrel and Tom Wilkinson and is described as "Match Point" meets Hitchcok, which is a tad redundant, isn't it?

Ian McKellen will be doing King Lear next year in London, presumably at the National. I still bitterly regret missing Ian Holm's Lear. I had tickets but spent the day with author Philip Pullman in Oxford and it took too long to get back to London. The happyb result: I stumbled on really cheap tickets to see Blue Nile in concert -- a band that almost never performs in concert, so the rarity of it almost made up for missing Holm.

Cannes organizers chose from 1520 movies to find some 50 films being shown in and out of competition. (Thousands of movies are screened one way or another at the market, the Director's Fortnight and so on.)

And the "Carry On..." films, which are namechecked in Alan Bennett's marvelously fun play "The History Boys, continue with film #32 set to be "Carry On London." They'v been making these flicks since 1958 and they never got around to "Carry On London" till now?