IFC’s General Manager Evan Shapiro has a blog(!) here — he loves the channel and very eager to hear feedback, so let him know your thoughts.

And we have a question for y’all — as more blogs appear here on IFCTV.com, it seems we’ll have to change our name from the rather singular "The IFC Blog"… any suggestions? Right now all that’s stuck in our head is Margot Tenenbaum’s "Your reviews weren’t that good."

Elsewhere: Cannes pull-quote of the day goes to Japanese director Masahiro Kobayashi, whose "Bashing" is one of the films in competition, and deals with the aftermath of a Japanese aid worker taken hostage in Iraq. His character finds herself rejected by society when she returns home. Kobayashi had harsh words for his homeland:

When asked to explain why Japanese who return from Iraq having been kidnapped can be ostracized, Kobayashi said he found the phenomenon hard to explain.

"To tell you the truth, it’s difficult for me to explain," he told reporters. "It’s perhaps due to the fact that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi adopted a very negative stance.

"He rejected responsibility for their (hostages’) acts and said it was up to the hostages to shoulder the responsibility," Kobayashi said, adding that the country’s conservative media had also swayed opinion against freed hostages.

"I think that Japan is sick," the director said. "There is a tendency to try and take revenge, to attack the weakest."

Today marks the 500th consecutive week of "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"‘s run in Mumbai — the Christian Science Monitor pays a visit to the theater.

Peter Goddard in the Toronto Star explains how Cannes can be both the most crushingly crowded, frantic place and the most lonely. Not there for the first time in years, he finds himself pining for the festival, which, "seen at a distance — the distance of not being there — the festival has
its spellbinding moments, which, like the town itself, survive each new
celebrity onslaught."

And, despite a year so far comfortingly free of any films with the necessary qualities to restart the endless rounds of awards chatter, both David Poland and Emanuel Levy seem determined to drop the dreaded O word.

+ Film tackles Japan’s hostage ‘taboo’ in Cannes (Reuters)
+ Bombay’s longest running matinee (CS Monitor)
+ There’s no movie experience like it. None. (Toronto Star)
+ The Return Of Jamie Foxx (The Hot Blog)
+ Robert Downey Jr.: Oscar Frontrunner (Emanuel Levy)