• It's not often we feel sorry for Rupert Murdoch, but there he was at the launch party for Moulin Rouge, having pumped $50m of his money into the picture, watching it all go wrong.
The cancan dancers specially flown in from Paris had just started their frilly-knickered frolicking when one of them waved an arm and got her bracelet caught in the veil of the dancer next to her.
Yards from where the Dirty Digger was whispering sweet nothings into the ear of his wife Wendy Deng, the pair wrestled angrily across the stage while the other dancers carried on the high kicking. For a moment it looked as though they would come to blows. Eventually they parted, but applause for the show was only ironic. They certainly can cancan, these girls. But not, it seems, in Cannes.
• Suffering armadillos, do we have to watch this sense less horror? In the Argentine film La Libertad, the lead character, a lonely woodcutter called Misael, kills an armadillo. He hits it with a piece of wood, the animal writhes in pain before he hits it again, then he skins it and roasts it for dinner. It has not been possible to obtain the recipe for the resulting dish. Disturbingly, there is no disclaimer telling us that no armadillos suffered in the making of this picture.
The screening of Lisando Alonso's debut feature in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section comes in the same week in which film fans here have been savouring anew the brutal ritual slaughter of a water buffalo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. And a new Filipino film contains scenes of canine cooking - and the dogs aren't doing the cooking.
• You don't know whether to laugh, cry or write a letter to your MP. The acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's new film is a devastating critique of Taliban oppression of Afghan women played out through Monty Python-like farce.
There is a scene in which a group of men who have lost their limbs as a result of treading on landmines race across a desert on crutches in pursuit of some prosthetic limbs that are parachuting from a Red Cross helicopter. In another, a man insists that he keeps a pair of wooden legs to remind him of his dead mother. It would all be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
• Male role model Hugh Hefner celebrates his 75th birthday in Cannes today with his Playboy Playmates at the beachside American Pavilion. Judging from the number of thong-sporting lovelies jockeying for the photo opportunities on the Croisette, it will be hard for him or his employees to lower the tone.
Clearly he is getting limbered up for his performance at the Oxford Union. Put on your bunny ears, pneumatic female undergraduates, the Hef is coming to town!
• How the great have fallen. Poor Barry Norman, once the uncrowned king of British film reviewing, has been humbled by the legendary hauteur of Cannes bureaucrats. They granted him a blue pass this year, which allows the same sort of access to the stars as the Huddersfield and District Gazette. Baz, gent that he is, accepted his fate without complaint.
