When will I be famous?

Welcome to alt.cannes, where you'll find Luke Goss, Val Kilmer (a lot) and Roseanne's ex at the market – and Terminator's nemesis stealing Viagra. It's a hard job, but TARA BRADYhad to do it

LUKE GOSS, erstwhile half of Bros, teams up with 50 Cent and Val Kilmer for vigilante cop drama Blood Out.

Gunsees Val Kilmer – back again and looking very like Fraggle Rock'sAll Knowing Trash Heap — take the rap for a Fiddy's arms-running gangsta.

Rupert Friend and – wait for it – Val Kilmer get stuck in crossfire between Russia and Georgia in Renny Harlin's 5 Days of August,a film so politically insightful it wrongly identifies the Lithuanian president as a man, and gets her name wrong.

If we didn’t know better we’d swear Kilmer had been hit with a tax bill for $500,000 last December. Oh.

Welcome to the Cannes Marketplace 2011, a mondo trash heap that proves the phrase “My film is in Cannes” is among the most unreliable in the English language.

Kilmer, Goss and Cent are regular players along the many kilometres of stalls, but the English-language king of this year’s Marché du Film has to be Tom Arnold; he will keep popping up as an action hero to the confusion of those who remember him as the chubby chap who was once married to Rosanne Barr.

It’s complicated. Cannes is all things to all movies. At the top of the heap 20 films compete for the Palme D’Or and another 20 grapple for Un Certain Regard. Bubbling under these grander gongs we find unofficial competitions of varying degrees of respectability. Awards from the Directors’ Fortnight, International Critics’ Week and the Vulcaine Prize might gleam proudly from any mantelpiece, but none are officially part of the festival.

Down a division we find newer, rival competitions. The Queer Palm, now in its second year, hopes to emulate the success of Berlin’s LGBT-themed Teddy and Venice’s Queer Lion.

Drop down further and all bets are off. The Palm Dog, now in its 11th year, is awarded to the best canine performance of the festival. (Laika, the star of Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre, is already the short-odds favourite for 2011.) If only the Hot D'or had that kind of longevity. The adult Cannes sideshow, now defunct, once saw the international porn industry decamp annually on to the Croisette. The competition moved away from the Côte d'Azur back in 2001.

And then there’s the rest.

Unless the speaker is Lars Von Trier – this year's Melancholiamarks his ninth appearance at the seaside shindig – the chances are "My film is in Cannes" translates as "I've put up a poster down the marketplace, nestled between other promos for The Terror Experimentand the new Val Kilmer."

This is a town where enthusiastic, desperate film-makers project their efforts on TVs strapped to their own heads; vans playing unwanted trailers weave between the town’s many Bugatti Veyrons; leaflets are handed out to the tune of half a rainforest.

The most heavily advertised films inevitably hail from Hollywood's tentpole sector. Billboards for JJ Abrams's Super 8, the new Mission Impossibleand Cars 2tower over the beaches.

But the truth about contemporary cinema – the horrible, terrifying truth – can only be discerned from the long road that is the Marché du Film.

To gaze upon the unloveliness of this seemingly endless bazaar is to go mad. Why are there so many Finding Nemo knock-offs? Why is the shark in rival fish animation Seafood making friends with a chicken? Why is the "fun" baby Yeti in Yoko so damned creepy? And when did Val Kilmer's neck get so big? Sadly, many of these products will fail to make it to a cinema near you. Lobbying groups may be required to secure a theatrical release for Love's Kitchen, a new romcom starring Gordon Ramsay or for Hard Times,a Viagra heist flick starring Linda Hamilton and John Lynch. The latter, "an arousing comedy", according to the publicity material, boasts the tagline of the season: "Stealing $63 million of Viagra; how hard could it get?"

Wandering through this boulevard of broken dreams, visiting parties wear one of two expressions. There's the "See what they've done there?" face suited to bad puns and winsome titling and there's the "It's come to this" face, a sort of wavy-line mouth not unlike the one sported by Muttley in Catch the Pigeon.It's a look that says "Holy corn, that's what Maria Bello is doing now; but she was awesome" or "We always knew Mena Suvari would end up playing alongside Tom Arnold and C Thomas Howell in a movie called Retribution(because "Revenge Has No Limits!", apparently).

It’s a look that says “I wonder if Korean children actually watched that Robots meets Mutant Turtles thing”.

We won’t talk about the sex: we daren’t. Suffice to say, the official competition fare appearing in today’s Screen Writer (see page 32) is the letters page from Jackie. We can’t bring ourselves to count the number of ugly Madagascar clones.

Be afraid, movie punters; be very afraid. There really is a Titanic 3.

yyy The Queer Palm 2011 is awarded tomorrow evening: queerpalm.fr

yyy See Screen Writer on page 32 for Donald Clarke’s take on sexy time at Cannes, and more from the festival in LifeCulture