Ladies and gentlemen—anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug—step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an "only-in-France aging cream." If sun and cigarettes don't turn your skin to crinkled leather, now there's a product to help you achieve that just-rolled-out-of-the-crypt look.

In this week's review of The Hangover III, "Entitled Fraternity Dicks Return to The Hangover Part III," Chris Packham writes: "In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and '80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and cheating at cross-camp field days." But the tables have turned, writes Packham: "Now the snobs have seized the cultural momentum and basically won the American economy."

"What Warner Brothers marketing is now calling the "Wolf Pack Trilogy" is funny but unlovable, asking the audience not just to laugh at all this meanness but actively to identify with it."

Here are ten slobs we love, guys who would be bullied by the "four pampered rich-boys" of The Hangover III.

Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly—Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some movies have special meaning for people even if they don't turn up on lists of established favorites. These are the secret movies we keep in our pockets like lucky coins—there's something intimate about them, as if they belong to us alone.

See Also: Ethan Hawke, Before and After: Watching an Actor Grow Up

The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy's comic implausibilities might be its four pampered rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the "Wolf Pack" without anybody ever making fun of them.

"With Star Trek," Mindel says, "it [became] a tool for me to allow the sterility of the sets to be amplified by distorting the light on the lens."

Daniel Mindel, A.S.C., is part of an ever-shrinking population: cinematographers who have yet to shoot a feature digitally. He acknowledges that he "will be forced" to do it eventually by "the corporate entities that drive our industry," but he believes "there is no need to use an inferior technology at this time."

I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We'll Get to the Coens)

Someday I'm going to write a song and call it "Ballad of the Blue Badge." I haven't figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color of your badge determines the ease with which you're able to gain entry to any of the 1,001 screenings taking place at any time. For members of the press, the most desirable badges are white (which allow you to sit at the right hand of God after you die, among other benefits) and rose (the badge I receive, which will get you into pretty much anything you might need to see and even some things you really don't want to see).

Photo by www.NicoleRivelli.com © 2012 Topeka Productions

Benicio Del Toro and Mathieu Amalric in Jimmy P.

In Arnaud Desplechin's English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro--freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies--is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World War II America.

Officially, the crowd crammed into the basement of the Paley Center on Thursday night had come for edification. Here was a panel discussion on the topic of Excellence in the Media, featuring Peabody Award-winners and -bestowers, hosted by documentarian (and class of '98 Peabody winner) Pat Mitchell, who actually kicked things off by declaiming from the Wikipedia definition of "excellence" -- certainly an homage to a beloved old Simpsons, that once-excellent show that scored its Peabody in 1996.

Considering that the Cannes experience consists mostly of critics and other assorted ornery types shambling into theaters, sitting in front of a screenful of flickering images for a few hours and then, like Flash Gordon’s Mole People, tumbling back out into daylight, news travels surprisingly fast.

Earlier today, a colleague and I had just stepped out of a midmorning screening of a rather steamy and interesting little thriller, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, when a third colleague began thinking aloud about what he might see next. Earlier in the morning, some of our friends who are surprisingly adept at being in two places at once had seen a picture called The Selfish Giant, screening not in the main competition, but in the Quinzaine, or Directors’ Fortnight, section of the festival. Our colleague told us what he’d heard about the movie, and warned us that it was probably going to be upsetting; a Cannes programmer had told him he still feels a little melancholy every time he thinks about it.

Let’s say that you and your friends get accused of being racist. And let’s say there’s nothing in your heart that fits that accusation. You know you’re a celebrator of freedom, a passionate American who wishes all people could enjoy the best that this country has to offer.

You’re white, incidentally.