I’m covering the Cannes Film Festival via the medium of Snapchat. Obviously.

Thursday May 16th 2013

When it comes to social networking, I pride myself on remaining at the forefront of progress. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, I documented my time spent queueing in the rain for Romanian arthouse dramas with a heady mix of tweets, Facebook messages and Instagram filters. This year I’ll also be making use of Vine, and — in an effort to prove that even the most impractical of technologies can be co-opted in the name of humblebragging — Snapchat.

If you’re not yet familiar with 2013′s greatest social barometer, please:

Snapchat is an app for iOS and Android that allows you to send images of your genitals playful video clips to your nearest and dearest, with the unusual caveat that the files delete themselves as soon as they’ve been viewed. This unique service has quickly become a hotbed of genital imagery artistic creativity across the globe.

And so, I’m giving Ultra Culture readers the opportunity to receive images of my genitals exciting coverage of the Cannes Film Festival direct to their phones for the next nine days, via this distinctive new medium. To count yourself among the lucky few, simply…

Click here to tweet me your Snapchat username.

Let’s not let this slip away like we did Words with Friends.

I’ve come up with a few names for future Tom Hanks characters

Monday May 13th 2013

By now, we’re all pretty much up to speed with the fact that Tom Hanks is a nice man, which is perhaps why he rarely attempts to convince us otherwise on screen. In Captain Phillips, as in so many other Hanks vehicles, he’s basically just a stand-up guy at the mercy of factors beyond his control — in this case: lack of weaponry on-board freighter, Somali pirates, Paul Greengrass.

For a while it was quite endearing to see Hanks stick so rigidly to playing blameless protagonists. His career was a bit like the first season of Entourage: entirely devoid of jeopardy and all the more intoxicating for it. But like that show, Hanks’s schtick started to wear thin as the years went by, and by the time E got engaged at the end of Season 6 he wrote, directed and starred in the dramatic black hole that was Larry Crowne, it was no longer satisfying to watch him constantly do the right thing all the time.

Has a SINGLE engaging screen character EVER worn a rucksack?

The easiest way to chart the deterioration of Hanks’s on-screen energy is to examine the names of his characters. Where his 80s career gave us such sublime handles as Lawrence Whatley Bourne III, Sherman McCoy and Detective Pep Streebeck, recent years have yielded the featureless monikers Thomas Schell, Robert Langdon and — of course — cheery old Mr. Crowne up there.

So just in case Hollywood finds itself short of ideas in the coming months, here are a handful of additional roles that they’re welcome to cast Hanks in:

The best use of parentheses on a poster for a Danish sex epic you’ll see this week

Thursday May 2nd 2013

The first half of Lars von Trier’s impossibly exciting two-part sex odyssey Nymphomanic, starring — amongst others — Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Christian Slater, Kate Ashfield, Willem Dafoe, Shia LaBoeuf, Jean-Marc Barr and Uma Thurman, will be released in the UK by Artificial Eye at some point within the next long while. The film failed to make the March submission deadline for this month’s Cannes Film Festival, so it’s still unknown when and where it’ll premiere.

In case it’s gone over your head, the parentheses represent a vagina.

When in doubt, stick an arbitrary number on the end of the title.

Tuesday April 30th 2013

(2012)

(2013)

The straight-to-DVD Mischa Barton vehicle Apartment 1303 hits UK stores on June 3rd, and will look great alongside last year’s Spanish horror import Apartment 143 on your shelf — with or without the intervening 1159 entries in the saga.

Okay, so Melissa Joan Hart also wants $2 million, and if you ask me she deserves every cent

Thursday April 25th 2013

In a clear sign that Hollywood has finished eating itself and is now starting to retch up some of the less digestible chunks, Melissa Joan Hart has today joined Zach Braff in appealing to the world’s internet users for $2 million to cobble together a second-rate star vehicle. And what’s more, she’s lined up a giant baby dressed as Jack Nicholson Hollywood heavyweight Tibor Takács to direct!

If there’s any justice in the world, this’ll be fully-funded by end of play Friday.