Column 
 
How to Party Crash 
 
 Ladies, if you're on your way to one of the big soirees being held on a private beach this festival, here's a tip: grab a pillow – or a marine. It seems the only way to break through the barriers and past security (who fail miserably at crowd control) is for the person you're with to yell "pregnant woman." That, or jump in line behind a uniformed serviceman and hold tight – and that's if you have a ticket. If not, you better just forget the whole thing. Sceptical? At Friday night's Fear and Loathing party – which is, by the way, an appropriate name if ever there was one – it worked for some. 
 
Talk about barbarians at the gate. Standing in line, or rather being shoved, poked and stepped on, some hundred ticket-holders waited and waited as security tried to manage the revellers through some studied shouting. Claiming they were simply waiting until Harvey Weinstein, Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Julie Delpy and others made their exit, the Gallic gatekeepers held everyone back including various studio executives and Jeff Goldblum. 
So, what did Goldblum do? Apparently, he went down to one of the public beaches and slunk his way along until he made it to the Carlton. Copycat sneaks be advised: the sand is hell on your Pradas. 
Nancy Tartaglione 
 
Gomez/Goldblum 
Jeff Goldblum with  
AndresVicente Gomez
CRITICS' POLL 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the most aptly titled film in competition if the Moving Pictures' Critics' Poll is taken as the litmus test. The response to Terry Gilliam's Hunter S. Thompson adaptation has been lukewarm at best, downright dismissive at worst. (One critic 
scored the film zero.) 
The surprise early front-runner is Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe (averaging around 8 out of 10) But with Lars von Trier, Todd Haynes et al still to enter the fray, most pundits reckon the best is yet to come. GM 

*****
 
They said... allegedly

Everyone passes through Euro-Tromaville in the Salon Esterel at the Carlton, from Steve Tish and Quentin Tarantino (pitching some nonsense called Forrest Gump or Pulp Fiction) to Michelangelo Antonioni and the demented guy with the spinning eyeballs trying to sell us on a project about the life of his pet hamster. We get to see it all, which gives us the option of rejecting Forrest Gumps and Pulp Fictions and brilliantly opt instead for Me and My Hamster, which will be ready for Cannes next year.
Lloyd Kaufman (Troma)

The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is out-grossing my films.
Paul Newman