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Carla Bruni-Sarkozy was embarrassed yesterday over an online film that features some vulgar comments she said about love and sex during her years as a young model.

Running for 27 minutes, the film has been uploaded to the popular video-sharing internet site YouTube. It contains interview excerpts of the young First Lady that pits her outgoing past with her refined present – as the First Lady of France.

In one segment, the Italian-born First Lady grabs a book entitled, “Hot International Love and Sex Guides,” from her handbag. The guide translates erotic key phrases into a total of seven languages.

“We need these kind of books because we’re travelling all around the world, we’re meeting new people and we want to know what to tell them in case we get into bed with them”, she said to interviewers on Channel 4’s Eurotrash show.

The then-28 Ms. Bruni in 1996 went on to cite four different translations of the statement “You get me very hot”. She ended with the Italian translation “Mi eccite tanto”. She also cited other explicit phrases, soliciting an “oh no!” from one of the interviewers. Producer Thomas Cazals, who gathered the portrait entitled “In the Tube with Carla Bruni,” mentioned he did it “starting with the naive idea of better getting to know this character”.

Swift action was taken by The Elysee Palace regarding the film, which was removed last night from the blog of Mr. Cazal.

Even though the film pays tributes from fashion personalities who have high regard for the beauty, intelligence, and wit of Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy, it won’t receive a warm welcome. The former model has been making efforts to keep her brazen past in the past after tying the knot with Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008. The couple were seen yesterday at a farming event in Paris

War was one of the major themes in the recently concluded 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Aside from the violence in films, the festival also experienced real violence as riot police suppressed protestors who were angered by a movie about the French military in North Africa.

Sunday’s grand prize went to a dreamy reincarnation story from Thailand. Domestic dramas were also among the 19 films that battled for the Palme d’Or. However, the intimacy projected by those films was negated by an army of war films.

Perhaps the film with the most controversy was the explosive thriller “Outside The Law”, which presented the Algerian war of independence. The film was directed by French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb.

During its premiere last Friday, police armed with shields and batons guarded the festival palace as protesters staged a demonstration at the town hall nearby to condemn the movie as anti-French.

Bouchareb was accused by right-wing politicians of twisting history with his emotion-filled account of the fight between the French military and the National Liberation Front (FLN) militants.

The film starts with the 1945 massacre of Algerian civilians by French military personnel in Setif. According to French historians, more than 15,000 Algerians died in the massacre.

Lionnel Luca, a lawmaker from President Sarkozy’s UMP party, mentioned that it was “a partisan, militant, pro-FLN film” that “compared the French to the (Nazi) SS and the French police to the Gestapo”.

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul of Thailand, the stunning winner of the Palme d’Or award in Cannes on Sunday, has shaped a career through dream-like films that recoils from conventional storytelling.

The 39-year-old Thai also stands as a firm critic of the Thai government’s censorship in his nation, which is experiencing a major political turmoil that has claimed the lives of dozens while injuring others more for the last two months.

Apichatpong does his work outside the stern boundaries of Thailand’s action-movie studio system to create films like the dream-like reincarnation story ‘Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives’, which won Cannes’ most prestigious award last Sunday.

He is also a favourite of the global festival circuit and is a frequenter at Cannes. Back in 2002, he received a sidebar competition award for ‘Blissfully Yours‘. In 2004, he won the jury prize for his film ’Tropical Malady’.

‘Tropical Malady‘ was a two-part film that starts as a love story in the city between a farm worker and a soldier. The second part was about sexual frenzy and forest death.

The jungle is also an important factor in ’Uncle Boonmee‘, a surreal movie set in the thick bush of northeast Thailand. The movie looks into myth, reincarnation, and politics.

Apichatpong, who prefers the nickname Joe, thanked “the spirits in Thailand that surrounded us” after receiving the Palme d’Or from Tim Burton, the president of the festival jury.

The Iraqi war returned to Cannes on Thursday as Naomi Watts and Sean Penn take the lead roles in the film ‘Fair Game’, based on a true story about a CIA spy who was forsaken by the Bush administration.

The film by Doug Liman, who also directed ‘The Bourne Identity’, received both boos and applause during the press screening days before the red carpet premiere in the French Rivieria.

The story tells how CIA spy Valerie Plame, played by Watts, was betrayed by the White House to get even at her husband, who made public claims that the Bush administration tampered with evidence regarding weapons of mass destruction to justify the war in Iraq.

US president George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq by saying Saddam was hiding an arsenal of such deadly weapons.

‘Fair Game’ is the second movie in 2010 that pays attention to the controversy. The other movie, ‘Green Zone’, sees Matt Damon playing the role of a US army officer searching for weapons of mass destruction in the Middle Eastern country.

The conflict in Iraq also reached Cannes Wednesday after British director Ken Loach showed off his own film ‘Route Irish’, tells the story of private security contractors working in Iraq.

Liman’s film is the only American movie vying for the Palme d’Or, which is the most prestigious award given at Cannes.

Bleak movies of Soviet dictatorship, murder, and police brutality are just some of the eyebrow-raising offerings from eastern and central Europe at Cannes.

“Some people make comedies. Others have a different point of view”, stated Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian director of the movie ‘My Joy’, which is all about the bad cops and deprived peasants in a snowy rural area in Russia. The film premiered Wednesday.

“A single artist cannot present all the points of view at the same time”, the director added to support the bleakness of his masterpiece, which is set in Russia despite being filmed in Ukraine. ‘My Joy’ is Ukraine’s first ever entry at Cannes.

The Ukrainian film competes for the top prize, Palme d’Or, which will be handed out this coming Sunday.

Film magazine Screen described the movie as “an intriguing but often messily impenetrable dramatic debut… It’s hard to imagine that many viewers will consider their patience sufficiently rewarded”.

Meanwhile, Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo is utilising the gothic associations of eastern and central Europe, which actually dates back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

“Tender Son”, the Palme entry of Mundruczo, is a modern version of the Frankenstein story. It starts screening on Friday.

Rudolf Frecska plays the read role for Mundruczo’s film, which is the 17 year old orphan’s acting debut. Frecska steps into the shoes of a young lad who kills a family while looking for his father.

On Wednesday, the UK’s Ken Loach tried to match the success of ‘The Hurt Locker’ movie at the Oscars after he entered his own film about the war in Iraq into the battle for the top prize in Cannes.

His movie ‘Route Irish’ got its title from the most perilous road stretch in the war-torn nation that connects the airport to the Green Zone in Baghdad, The film will have a screening for the press at the French Riviera film festival a day prior to its premiere on the red carpet.

Scooping the top award at Cannes back in 2006 with his movie about Ireland’s struggle for freedom from the British, Loach decided to enter ‘Route Irish’ in Cannes several days before the actual start of the festival last week.

The movie follows the life of two former soldiers from Britain who went to Iraq to work as private security contractors.

After one of them gets killed on Route Irish because of suspicious circumstances, the other one, struck with guilt, refuses to accept the official explanation regarding the incident and attempts to discover the truth about what really happened.

Loach’s film is among the 19 movies battling for the Palme d’Or to be awarded on Sunday. Last year, he also went for the top award at Cannes with the film ‘Looking for Eric’.

Loach is one of the two British directors competing for the award this year. The other is Mike Leigh, who is the director of the entry ‘Another Year’.

Sir Terry Wogan called his successor at the breakfast show Chris Evans yesterday and said to him, “You’re da man!”

The 71-year-old host phoned his former Radio 2 show from his Southern France holiday to mention that Children in Need was able to gather a record sum of around £39 million in the previous year. Aside from the announcement, Sir Terry also made sure to point out and praise the incredible ratings of his successor, Chris Evans. The show’s new-comer and present host was able to draw more than 9.5 million listeners, surpassing Tel’s with over a million more.

“I am delighted. Perhaps I should have left a little earlier because I was putting about one million people off”, joked the Irishman.

44-year-old Evans stated that Sir Terry “left at the right time” before chuckling loudly at Sir Terry Wogan’s “You’re da man” remark on air.

Evans also posted a blog entry yesterday dedicated to “thanking the Lord” for making people patronize and admire his performance on the radio show. Earlier this year, the 44 year old faced harsh criticism after he was chosen to replace the departing Sir Terry Wogan as host of the morning radio show.

Evans described the turn of events by further saying “It was news we didn’t dare to dream about”.

Summer 1971: Keith Richards woke up with a riff for a song that will make people dance forever.

“I loved the riff”, says Richards. “’Tumbling Dice’ is very much like ‘rolling stone.’ It has the same connotations”.

‘Tumbling Dice’ is actually of the hits featured on The Rolling Stones album ‘Exile on Main Street’ which was released in 1972. The rock album was a collection of the bluesiest and roughest rock ‘n roll tracks. Back then, the album was considered too raw for both fans and critics alike. After nearly four decades, the album has now reached the classic status. It is scheduled to be re-released on Tuesday including a couple of bonus tracks from the band’s own archive.

One of the real stories about ‘Exile on Main Street’ is the band’s self-imposed exile to avoid Britain’s tax problems back then. The band reached southern France, where they joined the bandwagon of travelling artists, poets, girlfriends, miscellaneous hangers-on, and drug dealers.

The music started in the basement of Richard’s villa.

“Basically because we could not find a studio in the south of France that we felt that we could record in, so we kind of got there by default”, Richard said. “We thought, ‘Well, we’ll just rehearse in my basement while we find a place to record.’ After a couple of weeks, we just looked at each other and sort of gave up looking anywhere else. We got it here, you know?”

The 63rd Cannes Film Festival opened Wednesday evening with glitz, empty judge’s chair, a late entry, and the blockbuster film ‘Robin Hood’.

Cannes’ jury, led by director Tim Burton, left one chair symbolically empty as a strike to Iran for detained Iranian director Jafar Panahi as they took the stage for the opening ceremony.

Jafar had been requested to join the festival jury; however, he was jailed in Evin prison in Tehran since March due to his film about the disputed Iranian presidential poll last year.

British director Ken Loach filled in the late entry for the competition. His movie ‘Route Irish’ is a usually contemporary film about two security contractors in Iraq.

The blockbuster of the competition is Ridley Scott’s heroic outlaw ‘Robin Hood’. Stars Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett filled in for the absence of the director due to an injury.

Scott envisions a social message with modern-day implications in the Robin Hood legend.

“People have been asking me, would Robin Hood’s aim be political?” the director told French news agency RFI. “Would he aim at certain figures and try and bring them down? Would his aim be economic, would he be looking at Wall Street and the huge sums of money that people have been patting themselves on the back with and the sub-prime mortgage collapse and all that?”

Crowe’s answer is no. Maybe flatteringly to media, the star believes Robin Hood would be seeing that the spread of information can be the true wealth.

Still, there is a sting behind Crowe’s implied compliment.

He concludes: “My theory would be that if Robin Hood was alive today he would be looking at the monopolisation of the media as the greatest enemy”.

The annual Cannes Fil Festival officially opened with the screening of the Hollywood movie ‘Robin Hood’.

The Ridley Scott film stars Russell Crowe as the legendary outlaw, along with Cate Blanchett, who played the character of Lady Marian. The two stars were on Wednesday’s red carpet for the gala screening of the blockbuster.

Tim Burton is part of the festival’s jury, who all rose on the stage as the ceremony to open the event began at the palace. One seat was symbolically left empty to signify the place of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is currently incarcerated in Tehran.

Panahi, who was working on a film about the Iranian presidential election of 2009, was supposedly part of the jury. Because of the story that he wanted to cover, he was arrested by the government of Iran, and is now held at Evin prison. The director has been detained since March.

On the other hand, the 12-day race was overflowing with a number of famous personalities like Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Naomi Watts, Mick Jagger, and Sean Penn.

Other celebrities like Salma Hayek, Aishawrya Rai-Bachchan, and Eva Longoria were also part of the shimmering stream during the grand affair.

Wearing diamonds earrings and an off-the-shoulder black sheath dress, British actress Helen Mirren arrived at the red carpet saying, “Cannes is great glamour, great craziness”.

“There’s nothing like it in the world, not even the Oscars”, she added.