- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 May 2001 14.50 BST
Jennifer Jason Leigh
"If I'm invited somewhere and there are cameras, I don't go, I don't want to," Anelka, 22, told the French sports daily L'Equipe. "I play football and that's it. I never wanted to be a media star."
Arsenal fans, who remember his graceless performances for the club in the late 1990s, before he left to play for Real Madrid, will not be surprised by his remarks.
"If there were no fans it would be even better for me - I could play in empty stadiums," he added, disclosing that he was keen to move to a club in Italy shortly.
In his acting debut, Anelka plays opposite the fine Catalan actor Jose Garcia and the Frenchman Gérard Lanvin in Alain Berberian's Le Boulet, an action flick with a footballing theme. Highbury devotees may like to know that Le Boulet translates as the Millstone.
• Who cares who wins the Palme d'Or at Cannes tomorrow? The top award has already been carried off. Jennifer Jason Leigh, the Hollywood actor, may not win any trophies for her directorial debut film, The Anniversary Party, which she made with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming, but her dog has already been presented with a collar to mark his acting debut in the film.
At the first Palme Dog awards this week, her labrador, Otis, was judged to have given the best performance of any canine turn at the festival. The judges, who included the Guardian's Derek Malcolm, were presided over by Mutley, a dog belonging to the Paris-based journalist Toby Rose.
Otis is reportedly considering several leads. And Mutley? He is poised to host the canine Oscars, the Wooftahs. Apparently he is a very gay dog.
• The Russian auteur Alexandre Sokhurov is halfway through his filmic tetralogy on 20th century dictators. His picture Moloch, about Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun, impressed critics at Cannes in 1999, though this year's Palme d'Or contender, Taurus, about the last days of Lenin, has been less well received.
Yesterday he revealed that the next film in the series will be about Emperor Hiro hito of Japan and surprisingly added: "I hate the political side of things. Politicians are incompetent, stupid."
Which dictator will Sokhurov choose for the fourth film? He declined to say, but Margaret Thatcher's life story has yet to be told on film.
• The Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, noted for exposing himself before the British paparazzi in the comedy Notting Hill, appears before the cameras nude in his latest film. In Human Nature, scripted by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, Ifans plays a modern day Tarzan who runs across a Darwinian scientist (played by Tim Robbins) and his girlfriend (Patricia Arquette). The pair cannot decide whether to train this naked wild man in the ways of 21st century urban living or to leave his simian tendencies be.
Is this the sort of thing that will confirm the bothersome quiz show host Anne Robinson in her racist views on Welsh people? Let's hope not.
• French critics detested Jean-Jacques Beineix's film Mortal Transfer on its release in Paris this year, and box office receipts were negligible. So, when the director of such films as Betty Blue and Diva brought Mortal Transfer before world film buyers at the Cannes festival, it needed to be marketed carefully. Sadly, the English-language poster describes the film as "like a bungee jump - without the bungee", which presumably means that it plummets to earth with a splat.
