CANNES, France (AP) — Associated Press journalists open their notebooks at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival:

KEANU REEVES STEPS BEHIND THE LENS

The transition from actor to director was not an easy one for Keanu Reeves.

Reeves, who showed clips from his upcoming film “Man of Tai Chi” to a select crowd on Monday, said it took him a while to get into the director’s mindset.

“The first day of that was not too much fun,” he laughed during an interview.

“As an actor you are concerned with your role, you are concerned with your story,” he said. “The director’s side is much more other, it is looking out. … The first day I just didn’t quite have it. It wasn’t pleasurable.”

Reeves describes the movie, in which he also stars, as “a contemporary Kung Fu film.” The film is in Cantonese and English.

Reeves said he didn’t want to try his hand at directing until he had the right story. He found it while he was working on “The Matrix” franchise and was working closely with Chen Hu, a martial arts specialist.

“He is who the story is based around. He has a traditional past, he was a young person, Tai Chi champion, National Chinese champion,” Reeves said. “On the other hand, he is also a stunt man who has worked in Beijing and Hong Kong and Hollywood. He has gone out into the world.”

Reeves was one of many who grew up attracted to martial arts movies.

“For me, it was attractive in the sense of the physical-ness of it, maybe the independence, maybe the community,” he said. “For the Kung Fu it is the right and wrong, or the struggle that the characters often face, like ‘They’re going to shut down the temple’ or ‘They have killed your brother’ or ‘You’re being attacked’ and you have to defend or explore. And the exoticness of it, and they look cool.”

“Man of Tai Chi” is set for release in China this summer, with release dates in other countries pending.

— Sian Watson, http://www.twitter.com/sianwatson

AISHWARYA RAI‘S ROLES AS MOTHER, ACTRESS, MODEL & AMBASSAADOR

After taking time off to become a mother, Aishwarya Rai says she’s ready to sink her teeth back in to her movie career — as long it’s for the right role.

Rai, who gave birth to a daughter in 2011, said her time away from film has “flown by.”

Rai says her career choices from here on in will also have to fit in with her new family, even when it comes to doing press interviews.

“Right now I am talking to you while she is taking a nap,” she said during her interview at The Martinez Hotel in Cannes on Monday

“You just naturally discover how to do it because even, like everything else in my life you are just multi-tasking, you just figure out a way to schedule your life and that’s what I have been doing ever since motherhood.”

This is Rai’s 12th visit to the Cannes Film Festival. Beside being a L’Oreal brand ambassador, she was asked to be guest of honor at a special event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema.

“It’s very gracious of the festival to acknowledge it, to have an evening dedicated to celebrating it,” she said.

— Adam Egan, http://www.twitter.com/adamegan

A VERY INTIMATE PARTY IN HONOR OF JAMES FRANCO

The late-night party for James Franco’s “As I Lay Dying,” held in the compact luxury men’s clothing store Smalto, already promised to be a tight-knit affair. But the event became even more intimate with guests rubbing elbows — and much more — as the soiree went well above its capacity limit on Monday night.

Franco didn’t seem to mind the cramped quarters. Dressed in a tuxedo, he held court on a black leather couch, huddled up with good friend Ahna O’Reilly and others, laughing at one point as they looked at their phones.

The event was put on by the charity Art of Elysium, which provides entertainment for sick children in hospitals.

— Nekesa Mumbi Moody, http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

PHOENIX (AP) — It was the customer service disaster heard around the Internet.

An Arizona restaurateur, fed up after years of negative online reviews and an embarrassing appearance on a reality television show, posted a social media rant laced with salty language and angry, uppercase letters that quickly went viral last week, to the delight of people who love a good Internet meltdown.

“I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE,” read the posting on the Facebook wall of Amy’s Baking Co. in suburban Phoenix. “YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD.”

It was, to put it kindly, not a best business practice. Add to that an appearance earlier this month on the Fox reality television show “Kitchen Nightmares,” where celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay gave up on trying to save the restaurant after he was insulted, and you have a recipe for disaster.

“That’s probably the worst thing that can happen,” said Sujan Patel, founder and CEO of Single Grain, a digital marketing agency in San Francisco.

In the evolving world of online marketing, where the power of word of mouth has been wildly amplified by the whims and first impressions of anonymous reviewers posting on dozens of social media websites, online comments, both good and bad, and the reactions they trigger from managers, can make all the difference between higher revenues and empty storefronts.

Hotels, restaurants and other businesses that depend on good customer service reviews have all grappled in recent years with how to respond to online feedback on sites such as Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook and Instagram, where comments can often be more vitriol than in-person reviews because of the anonymous shield many social media websites provide.

No matter how ugly the reviews get, businesses need to be willing to admit mistakes and offer discounts to lure unhappy customers back, digital marketing experts said.

“In the past, people just sent bad soup back. Well, now they are getting on social media and telling all their friends and friends of friends how bad the soup was and why they should find other places to get soup in the future, so it takes the customer experience to another level,” said Tom Garrity of the Garrity Group, a public relations firm in New Mexico. “The challenge becomes — how do you respond when someone doesn’t think your food or product is as great as you think it is?”

In Amy and Samy Bouzaglo‘s case, the bad reviews were compounded by their horrible reality TV experience. The couple said during a recent episode of “Kitchen Nightmares” that they needed professional guidance after years of battling terrible online reviews. They opened the upscale pizzeria in an upscale Scottsdale neighborhood about six years ago.

“Kitchen Nightmares” follows Ramsay as he helps rebuild struggling restaurants. After one bite, he quickly deemed Amy’s Baking Co. a disaster and chided the Bouzaglos for growing increasingly irate over his constructive feedback. Among his many critiques: The store-bought ravioli smelled “weird,” a salmon burger was overcooked, and a fig pizza was too sweet and arrived on raw dough.

“You need thick skin in this business,” Ramsay said before walking out. It was the first time he wasn’t able to reform a business, according to the show.

Amy’s Baking Co. temporarily closed last week after the episode aired. A Bouzaglo spokesman said the couple was not available for an interview Monday. The restaurant’s answering machine was full. Emails and Facebook messages were not returned.

A wall post published last week claimed the restaurant’s Facebook, Yelp and Twitter accounts had been hacked, but hundreds of commenters expressed doubt. Social media sites show someone posting as a member of the Bouzaglo family had been insulting customers over negative reviews since at least 2010.

The story bounced across the Internet, generating thousands of comments on Facebook, Yelp and Twitter, and prompting nearly 36,000 people to sign a petition on Change.org that asks the Department of Labor to look into the Bouzaglo’s practice of pocketing their servers’ tips.

While many corporations hire communications experts to respond to every tweet, Facebook message and online review, the wave of digital feedback can be especially challenging for small businesses with small staffs, digital consultants said.

For one thing, there is so much online content to wade through. Roughly 60 percent of all adults get information about local businesses from search engines and entertainment websites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, according to a 2011 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“Customer service is a spectator sport now,” said Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, a social media marketing consultancy in Indiana. “It’s not about making that customer happy on Yelp. That’s the big misunderstanding of Yelp. It’s about the hundreds of thousands of people who are looking on to see how you handle it. It’s those ripples that make social media so important.”

In their “Kitchen Nightmares” episode, Amy and Samy Bouzaglo are seen yelling and cursing at customers inquiring about undercooked food or long delays. They blame online bullies.

“We stand up to them,” Amy Bouzaglo tells the camera at one point. “They come and they try to attack us and say horrible things that are not true.”

That’s exactly how businesses shouldn’t respond, the digital experts said.

“If your policy is to berate the customer online, that doesn’t create good public relations,” Garrity said.

Baer said he tells clients to create a response matrix representing different potential complaints that staff can refer to whenever bad feedback arises. Creating the comment chart before the bad publicity hits helps ensure businesses aren’t responding to angry or disappointed customers with their own anger or disappointment, Baer said.

A 2011 Harvard study found Yelp’s 40 million reviews disproportionately affect small businesses. The research found a one-star increase in Yelp’s five-star rating system resulted in a revenue jump of up to 9 percent for some restaurants, while chains with sizable advertising budgets were unaffected.

“You have to respond 100 percent of the time, whether you like it or not,” Baer said. “Businesses need to assign someone to stay on top of it.”

In Arizona, Amy and Samy Bouzaglo had planned a grand reopening ceremony and news conference for Tuesday, but the news conference was canceled late Monday after legal threats from Fox.

Fewer than a dozen people were waiting when the restaurant reopened Tuesday. Four guards blocked the door and turned reporters away. Inside, a smiling Samy Bouzaglo posed for pictures and told customers that the tension captured in the episode was staged. That was a disappointment for some.

“I wanted it to be dramatic and people yelling,” said Ricky Potts, a 29-year-old blogger who ate at the restaurant for the first time Tuesday only to declare the food good and the service routine. “Basically, I wanted it to be the circus that the TV episode was.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Khaled Hosseini, whose novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide, knows what a lucky man he is.

The Afghan-American author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” continued his amazing run Tuesday night as he appeared before an overflow crowd at the Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Union Square. With some 300 seated before him and dozens more watching on a video screen a floor below, Hosseini spoke for around 40 minutes about his new novel, “And the Mountains Echoed.”

The book, published Tuesday, will likely become one of the summer’s favorite reads. It has received admiring reviews and reached the top 10 on Amazon.com well before its official release.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner with the unveiling Wednesday of a monument in the composer‘s birthplace of Leipzig.

Wagner’s compositions such as the opera cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen” have been hailed as sublime works of art that belong to the core canon of Western culture.

But the composer’s visceral hatred of Jews has also been cited as inspiring Adolf Hitler‘s anti-Semitism.

His association with the Nazis, despite dying 50 years before Hitler came to power, means Wagner’s music is rarely played in Israel.

The monument by German artist Stephan Balkenhol shows a young Wagner overshadowed by his older, famous self.

Some of Wagner’s works will be performed later in the day in Bayreuth, where the composer’s descendants organize an annual music festival.

BEIJING (AP) — Two emotionless prison guards watch Ai Weiwei as he eats, sleeps, paces, showers — and even sits on the toilet — in the Chinese artist’s new obscenity-filled, metaphor-rich music video mocking state power.

The video accompanying the visual artist‘s heavy metal single “Dumbass” is meant to reconstruct his 81-day detention in 2011, which was part of an overall crackdown on dissent. Ai‘s subsequent conviction for tax evasion has been seen as punishment for his activism.

Ai has used his art to draw attention to injustices in China and the need for rule of law.

His music video released Wednesday depicts an insensitive, overbearing state power that ignores individual rights. The lyrics include obscene insults, and the images include animals that have become euphemisms for defiantly circumventing strict censorship.