- guardian.co.uk, Friday May 18 2007 14.23 BST
'Scorsese did the same thing last year' ... Jerry Seinfeld promotes his latest film in Cannes. Photograph: Getty
I have started to realise that there are a thousand Cannes in Cannes. There is the glittering shop-window display of the main competition, and there is the gaudy, bustling bazaar of the marché behind the Palais, with its myriad stalls flogging monster movies and "erotical thrillers". There are the VIPs who wave from the red carpet and there are the others: the wannabes and blaggers and harassed buyers and sellers, and the rubber-necking tourists who clog up the Croisette until the gendarmes move them on.
Then there are the three, four, five press events running simultaneously and a gaggle of film screenings taking place in different venues at the exact same time. We are saturated by choice, bamboozled by options. So far I keep panicking and taking the wrong one.
Yesterday evening I tripped off for cocktails with Frank Miller while my Guardian colleagues (Peter, Andrew, Charlotte) moseyed along for drinks with Harvey Weinstein. Cocktails with Miller was not quite how I envisaged it, in that the place was full of industry suits and Miller didn't even say hello. Instead we were treated to a presentation about a film that hasn't actually been made yet, plus a lot of Hollywood number-crunching. Apparently, Lions Gate entertainment expects its box office takings from the past 12 months to be in excess of $400m. I was so unnerved by the whole experience that I actually wrote that down.
Weinstein's bash, on the other hand, was altogether more cosy and exclusive. There were only about 20 people there and Harvey chatted at length about the problems he's suffered with Grindhouse and his concerns over the response to Michael Moore's Sicko, and everyone sat around on a damn rooftop terrace and drank watermelon martinis. They were probably drinking them at the very moment that I forced my way past on the street below, hot and bothered, with my notes about Lions Gate's global takings still rattling in my bag.
I woke this morning to read over the trade papers. There was a review of Fay Grim, the new film from Hal Hartley and a sequel to his 1998 drama Henry Fool. I loved Henry Fool and would have been interested to see what its characters were getting up to now. But no - it's already been and gone. A few pages further in was a news story about Jerry Seinfeld, who jumped off the roof of the Carlton hotel, dressed as a bumblebee, as a means of promoting his new movie. "They tell me that Scorsese did the same thing last year for The Departed," he quipped to reporters afterwards.
The Carlton hotel was where I went to meet Frank Miller. If I'd only looked up from that Lions Gate presentation I'd have seen Jerry Seinfeld floating by. But again, I missed it.
Still, what goes around comes around, and sometimes in the most entertaining of ways. Just now - and right when I was writing my paragraph about the Weinstein bash - Charlotte Higgins attempted to take her lunch onto the balcony and walked slap-bang into the sliding glass door. That will teach her. All of a sudden I feel a lot less irritated about the whole state of affairs.
