The Rocchi Report: You Are at Cannes.

You arrived on the 15th. It's the 25th. Ten days and ten nights, a nice round number. Round because it's rolling over you, and you feel that weight. How is the cat doing? What about the mail? How are the plants? You left all these things in the hands of friends, but you still worry. You'd like to go take care of them yourself. Because then you'd be home. You still need to get thank-you gifts for the custodians of your keys, the cat, the plants. You've seen 24 films. You needed to go back through the press screening schedule to arrive at that number. Consult your notes, scrawled in a clumsy hand in the dark of the various theaters. Last night, you ran into a film critic for a weekly magazine you've gotten to know. He was leaving a film you were about to see. How was it, you ask. He offers a sentence and shrug. I've run out of opinions, he says. You know the feeling.

But opinions is what you're here for. You're a machine in this job -- you turn a movie into a thousand words, five hundred words, two hundred words, a paragraph. A sentence. A well-polished phrase for broadcast or another journalist. You want to be clever and insightful, because those things got you here. That and a plane. Now and then, a film doesn't work for you and you get up, get out. You step on feet. Pardonnez moi, Pardonnez moi. Apology is a universal language. You don't write about a film if you walk out of it. You have something like ethics, or maybe it's just standards. You're in it to win it, opening title to final credit. And if you walk out of something, maybe you can get to something else. The endless pursuit of the next experience. I heard this one was good. That one has no buzz. I don't know a thing about that film, but it's in competition. All your research has been used up. Now you follow the timing of the press guide, as if all of cinema was a bus line; you'll take whatever comes along next.

You slept in this morning. All it did was refresh you enough to make you realize how tired you are, bring the number of your sleep deficit into single digits. It killed your momentum. Keep moving, keep moving. Any meal you eat sitting down is a moral victory. Any time to yourself is a retreat. You can't get your wireless to work. Your laptop tells you there are 12 networks in range. Most of them are locked down. The one that you have the code for isn't working for you. This is the way of the world. Yesterday you told yourself you would go back to the flat and take a break. Swim in the ocean. You walk to the blue sea and step in. All you can smell is salt. The water is cool and clear. So clear that once you're out waist-deep you can see a jellyfish float by. Nobody told you about this. You have second thoughts. You walk down the shore away from your new, potentially toxic friend. You see another jellyfish. Second thoughts move up in the rankings. There are no jellyfish in theaters. But you came to get away from it all, and to remind yourself there's a world out there that isn't in a theater. You screw up your courage and immerse yourself in the ocean. It's cold. You can taste primeval nature. All life came from here. Some of it stayed. Like the jellyfish, remember them? You wonder what you'd do if a jellyfish stung you. Urban legend says you get someone to urinate on the sting area, and that washes away the poison. You saw that episode of Friends, too. But the beach is deserted and even if it weren't, your French is definitely not good enough to ask a stranger to do that.  You walk back up the shore, in a sliver of sunset between flats. There. You're human. You're connected to nature. Now go see another movie.

They aren't screening Clerks II for the press. Someone outside the Palais is handing out invitation flyers for Clerks II but they say to you press aren't welcome. That's a great sign. Way to go, Kevin. Normally you'd not want to see Clerks II, but after 24 Cannes films -- loaded with sex, depression, repression, war, tragedy, memories of fascism -- you could do with a few potty jokes. You got invited to a sneak preview of Borat. You laughed -- the deep, barking laughs people make when their laughter is propelled out of them by a mix of shock and shame. Nothing funnier than naked guys wrestling. The Rock was at the sneak preview. You tried to get a picture of him, all you could get was his ear. You could have gotten closer, but you'd feel like a paparazzi. You have your standards.

Hey, you're working in the South of France. Shut up. Go cry to a coal miner, a teacher, an ER doctor. They'd tell you to shove it. They'd be right. Call your friends to complain. They'd sit in their offices, in their cubes, in their cars on their commute and say nice things while thinking "crybaby." Or maybe they wouldn't, but you think they should. You've seen some great films. One of them made you miss long-lost friends. One of them was good, and it reminded you of that bad thing that happened once. What you see on the screen is passing through the windows of the soul and shining light on the memories you keep at the back of your head so they don't make you sad. It's a good thing it's a good movie. Or maybe it's a good movie because it made you sad. All you can do in your job is try and tell people why you feel the way you do about a film. To have your reasons. The computer room smells like burning and ozone, laptop power strips struggling to turn 220 volts of French current into the 110 your appliances can use. The difference becomes heat. When you pick up your power strip it feels like a stone that's been in the sun. Photographers put their stepladders near you. Gotta have an edge. Their pay depends on getting a famous person to make something like eye contact. Kirsten or Hugh or Halle or Kate. It's all first names when they shout. You say excuse me and power off your computer. You have to get upstairs, get in line. You have another movie to see. You have another chance to be amazed, amused, impressed, awestruck. That's what you're here for. That's why you do it. Chasing transcendence. Again and again.