Cannes – Sunday

Missed ‘A Prophet’ for a second time, decided that waking up at 7am to get in line for the 9am screening after three hours sleep was probably asking too much of even a hardened cinephile.

Instead checked out the midday screening of Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock (2 out of 5) – well enough made and perfectly watchable but felt more like a feel good / coming of age TV movie than something from Ang Lee – in short a easily forgettable film.

Headed off to BFI / LFF drinks on the roof of the Palace Stephanie (still can’t get used to not calling it the Noga / Hilton nor it seems can anyone else)

BFI / LFF reception on the roof of the Palais Stephanie

Left BFI drinks and headed over to Morrison’s Irish pub for the Anvil Party (RAWK DOODZ)

Anvil Stamp

Completely out of the context of normal Cannes (but then what is normal in Cannes apart from overpriced food, drinks and permatans) we got a live set from Anvil, complete with encores enthusiastically cheered on by the crowd.

Anvil live at Morrison's pub, Cannes

Cannes – Saturday

Just arrived in Cannes, picked up the car and dropped bags off at villa and now off to pick up badge and tickets, hopefully in time to catch the 3pm screening of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet which Screen have just given a great review.

Picking up badge

[update: missed 'A Prophet' - by the time we'd got up our badges, dashing down the Croisette to pickup invitations and then back to the Lumiere for 3pm didn't seem feasible - in fact I missed all three screenings of it that I attempted to make this week, obviously I wasn't meant to see this film here, which is extra annoying as going back over the week I think it probably was the one film I would have enjoyed the most and I suspect a strongcontender for the Palm D'Or. Still at least I have it to look forward to when back in London - Optimum are realising it in the UK later this year]

Jacques Audiard's A Prophet

Popped in to the UK film pavilion and caught the end of interesting panel hosted by Power to the Pixel on digital financing and  distribution. Left the UK film pavilion and headed next door to AmPav to get some sun and read the dailies. 

The American Pavillion in Cannes

Grabbed dinner at La Pizza and then went off to meet friends at the Petit Majestic (as the de-facto and cheap, by Cannes standards, late night drinking hole de choix, the recession seems to have worked in their favour, certainly no sign of a slowdown here) finally finishing the night off in a more civilised fashion at the Grand (although after paying €12 for a small glass of Rose you feel like you’ve just been mugged, kicked in the gutter and then propped up in a plastic seat on the lawn, no wonder the Petit Majestic is rammed)

The Petit Majestic

Cannes 2009 – Line up Announced

Yesterday Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux announced the line up for this years festival and a pretty fantastic line up it seems to be too. New films from Almodóvar, Michael Haneke and Tarantino, for starters.

Variety describe the Competition line up as “Cannes’ biggest heavyweight auteur smackdown in recent years” and judging by the list of names their probably not far off the mark. Screen responsed to the announcement in much the same way “heavyweight Cannes line-up”

Over in Un Certain Regard this year is Cristian Mungiu, who won the Palme d’Or in 2007 with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Day, with his new film Tales From The Golden Age. Originally the name of a set of scripts set in the Ceausescu era, of which 4 Months was supposedly one. It now seems to be the title of a single film described as  ”a collection of Romanian urban legends from the communist era“. Why has it been relegated to Un Certain Regard after a Palme d’Or win for 4 months is not yet clear, will have to wait and see.

Haven’t had time yet to go over all the competition and sidebar titles properly yet. Michael Haneke new  film The White Ribbon looks interesting and almost certainly slightly harrowing. The press notes describes it as follows “Some inexplicable events disturb the quiet life of a German village, just before World War I. A cable has been put up to trip the doctor riding his horse, a barn is set on fire, two children are abducted and tortured…” in other word classic Haneke material. Will Tarantino be back on form? Judging by the trailer it seems unlikely, but on the off chance he is it’s too good to pass over, so it’s firmly on my Cannes ‘to see’ list.

According to Screen, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro will now open Directors’ Fortnight despite him previously turning down an out of competition slot. After Youth Without Youth you have to wonder if Tetro is yet another dud and has been given the opening slot for Directors’ Fortnight simply because it’s Coppola.

Anyway, my accreditation has been confirmed so will have to wait to May to see which ones turn out to be worthy of the hype and which previously unheard of gem will set the Croisette buzzing this year.
 

Adventures with an Arduino and LCD display

If the culmination of several hours work was seeing “Hello world!” appear on your computer screen you might be worried, or at least decide to use a different language next time. But there’s something very rewarding about seeing the same words appear on hardware device like a 16×8 Liquid Crystal display. Maybe it’s the fact that you’ve had to read the data sheet to understand how the thing wires up, maybe the risk that you’ll connect the pins the wrong way round and blow something.

Anyway here was my first attempt, took a little while to realise I had to adjust the contrast in order to see anything (that’s what the 5k pot hanging off the back of the breadboard is there for). But once you’ve figured out how to wire your particular model up (mine was a LMB162ABC from Topway) and supplied a reference supply to the Contrast (V0) pin, most of the really hard work like initialisation is actually taken care of by the Arduino LiquidCrystal library.

Arduino + LCD + LiquidCrystal lib in 4 Bit mode (7 pins)

The standard library only seemed to deal with a single line of text, this may just be a case of needing to send a line break, but as I was testing it out via a serial connection my line breaks were causing the string to be sent. The LCD4Bit library solved this issue and also reduced the number of pins I needed to use to drive the display to just 6 (rather than the 7 used by the standard Library). This is achieved by permanently pulling the RW pin down to low (it’s unlikely your ever going to want to read information from the display) 

Arduino + LCD + LCD4Bit lib in 4 Bit mode (6 pins)

Anyway, the next project is to tie it up to an Ethernet shield and send some data to it. After that I want to play with the little JPG module/camera that has just arrived from Hong Kong and see if I can send some pictures back the other way.