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Bill Murray, two watches and three friends make a meme with Cannes photo

Was every one of these French Dispatch movie pals dressed for a different occasion? Twitter thought so, and had fun with it.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
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Gael Cooper
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Bill Murray tends to march to the beat of own drummer, and never was this more evident than in a photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival this week. Murray is pictures with director Wes Anderson and actors Timothée Chalamet and Tilda Swinton, all of whom worked with Murray on a new film, The French Dispatch, out this fall. But each of the four in the photo is pulling off a very distinctive style -- and none appear dressed for the same event.

Chalamet looks the part of a millennial straight from central casting, with a casual T-shirt and black boots. Anderson's in a pinstriped but traditional suit, Swinton in a bright blue stylish pantsuit. Then there's Murray, in shorts and tennis shoes, a floppy hat, two watches for some reason, and the world's most mismatched patterned shirt. It's eclectic fashion to say the least, and observers were quick to dress up the photo as a meme.

Many chose four very different but related entities, assigning one of them to each of the four French Dispatch personnel based on their outfits.

"Pitch, first draft, final proof, comments section," one of the popular tweets declared, labeling Murray, of course, as the often no-holds-barred "comments section."

Another tweet looked at various social-media platforms, declaring Chalamet to be the youth-appealing TikTok, Anderson to be newsy Twitter, stylish Swinton to be Instagram , and rollicking Murray as Facebook.

The French Dispatch focuses on three stories set at a French outpost of a fictional American newspaper. The movie opens Oct. 22 in the US and UK, and Oct. 21 in Australia.

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