Manning's Cannes 2005 pictures

Tami had the opportunity to work at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and I tagged along for a few days and bummed around. I ate a lot of ice cream and read some books, mostly. And took some pictures.

—Manning

This is what the Cannes Film Festival looks like if you don't have credentials! You stand around outside the Palais de Festival behind fences with cops everywhere, trying to make out the faces of the tiny people on the red carpet in the background, in the hopes one of them is The Rock or somebody.

You can zoom in on your camera all you want. It won't help. I have no idea who these people were.

I don't know what these guys were all about! They were staging some sort of protest right across the street from the Palais! They were wearing sort of funny, overdone formalwear along with fake blood and dirt on their faces. The one guy was throwing handfuls of fake dollar bills to the crowd...

Here's what the dollar bills looked like. They were printed in gold reflective stuff on white paper, so they photographed really badly, unfortunately. But man, George Washington looks like the terrifying He-Man villain TrapJaw! I always liked to think of Trapjaw as Jerkbox's mean uncle. But I digress...

Here are the stairs in front of the Palais again, after all the hubbub died down. There are film openings a bunch of times every day, complete with stars and directors and stuff, so this place is alternately crowded or empty depending on the schedule.

I took a really long walk along the beach one night, away from the festival. This is a look back toward Cannes from about a mile down the beach. Those spotlights were crazy, and all the buildings and yachts were lit up really neat.

This is a shot out onto the water, so you can see all the lit-up yachts all lined up all along the coast.

Our hostel (yeah, there's a hostel in Cannes!) was decorated with tons of crappy movie posters. Man, I come to the South of France all the way from Philadelphia to sleep in a bunkbed under... a picture of Philadelphia. Amazing.

This hotel has a neat mural of all sorts of movie history stuff on the side. I like the juxtaposition of the moon guy with the busted eye from A Trip to the Moon and the pod thing from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Since I didn't have credentials to attend most of the stuff at the festival, I just wandered around the beaches and town all day. There's a really old castle-lookin' church-lookin' building up at the top of a hill, so I found my way up there and took some pictures. The festival happenings are pretty much right smack in the center of this picture; the Palais is just beyond all those white tents that make up the various pavillions. It was neat to be up on this hill and look down there and think, Tami is somewhere hidden in this picture.

Another view from up on the hill, this time down the other side, facing the town to the South of Cannes, whatever that might be. The coastline curves around over there, forming a sort of bay, which I walked all the way around one night, and saw unexplained fireworks.

Here's the big ol' clock tower thing. I tried to find a way up there, but couldn't figure it out. That clock tower is the highest point in the town; you can see it from everywhere.

Another look at the bay from up on the hill. Jeez, that's a lot of boats!

If you wander down a dark alley alone in Cannes, you might get jumped by... the ocean! Look out!

Man, pretty.

After I took this picture, I realized this was a topless beach and I probably shouldn't be taking pictures. In the original huge version of this file, you can see some boobs here and there. Oops. Sorry, ladies.

Please believe me when I say I'm not going for a late 80's Bobby Brown/Gumby hairstyle here; it's just real windy.

How many sailboats are there in Cannes? That's easy, just count the masts and divide by two! Ho ho ho.

Okay, this picture is terrible, but it's the closest thing to a paparazzi shot I'd get the whole time I was in Cannes. This is right as the movie Last Days was getting out, and that phalanx of people at the front is some bald guy, Lukas Haas, another bald guy, Gus Van Sant, Michael Pitt, and some blonde lady who's not Asia Argento, because Asia Argento is hidden behind Lukas Haas and Gus Van Sant there. That tall dude way on the right with the sunglasses is Dave Grohl, and Kim Gordon was a little bit behind him, but didn't make it into the picture. Anyway, this picture is stupid, and I can't understand why so many people hung out at EVERY film opening to try to take hundreds of pictures just as crappy as this. On their cellphones, even.

Hooray! This is me and Tami coming down the red carpet of the Palais after we watched the midnight opening of a film called Midnight Movies! We left a little early, so we've got the whole staircase to ourselves here.

That's it! See ya!