Amid the greatest economic downturn in 60-years, advertising muckety-mucks, sycophants, hangers-on, and their girlfriends are off, once again, partying topless and banana-hammocked in Cannes.
What will win best-of-show this year? An ad for Lego blocks that never ran or an ad for Scrabble that never ran? Or will a viral video for an obscure clothing company that no one outside the industry ever saw, carry home the titanium?
In 1939 Jean Renoir created what many cineastes regard as the best film ever made and that includes "Citizen Kane." The movie was "The Rules of the Game," and it involves the French aristocracy frittering the world away as the world is about to explode into WWII. Here is the Harvard Film Archive's synopsis of the movie:
"In his stinging appraisal of the erotic charades of the French leisure class before World War II, Renoir satirizes the manners and mores of a society near collapse. Alternating between farce and melodrama, realism and tragedy, the film centers on a lavish country-house party given by a marquis and his wife, where the complicated intrigues of the upper-class guests are mirrored by the activities of the servants. Banned on its initial release as "too demoralizing," The Rules of the Game has come to be regarded as one of the great masterworks of the cinema."
Sounds like Cannes, don't it?
