Une vente aux enchères hollywoodienne propose une veste de James Dean, des dessins originaux de , des objets de Charlie et la Chocolaterie… Le rêve américain à portée de tous? Pas sûr.
En mai, à Beverly Hills, le vide-grenier le plus chic du moment va attirer les foules. Chic, et
, sans doute. Puisque les objets qui y seront proposés seront des pièces aussi uniques qu’imprégnées de l’aura des stars qui y sont à jamais liées. La société Profiles in History est spécialisée dans ce genre de centes aux enchères: en juin prochain, elle organisera d’ailleurs la vente de la collection- également fabuleuse- accumulée par Debbie Reynols.
Mais à propos des enchères des « Souvenirs d’Hollywood », le site de Profiles in History explique qu’elle a rassemblé « quantité de costumes étonnants et symboles des films les plus populaires d’Hollywood et des shows de télé ». Et de nous promettre en prime « une offre incroyable » en matière de d’animation avec la vente de dessins de production originaux, maquettes ou affiches liés à cette industrie et plus particulièrement à Walt Disney.
C’est ainsi que l’on retrouvera des originaux de Blanche Neige et les Sept Nains, qui fut en 1937 le tout premier long-métrage d’animation au monde à la fois sonore et en couleurs. Mais aussi des chefs d’oeuvre de maîtrise graphique signés Tex Avery (avec Tom et Jerry)… ou, dans un tout autre genre cinématographique, les gants de Stallone dans Rocky, une veste portée par James Dean, dans La Fureur de Vivre (Rebel Without A Cause, 1955) ou une confiserie fabuleusement indigeste du Charlie et la Chocolaterie de
Dans le magazine Details, Ryan Reynols a confié que son divorce avec était extrêmement difficile à vivre pour lui. Confessions d’un homme meurtri mais prêt à en découdre.
Chacun sa route, chacun son chemin, comme disait le poète.
et Scarlett Johansson sont un jour arrivés au carrefour de leur vie à deux et ont choisi des itinéraires différents. Mais depuis cette séparation en décembre 2010, le comédien souffre énormément. C’est ce qu’il a courageusement confié à Details. «Toute personne qui divorce passe par une phase de douleur, mais il y a toujours moyen de s’en sortir. Moi je n’y suis pas encore», a-t-il précisé… un discours en demi teinte, donc.
Actuellement en tournage à Cape Town, le beau gosse aux allures de James Dean est encore très affecté. «J’ai bon espoir de me sortir de cette situation. Je suis optimiste mais je pense que je ne me marierai plus jamais». S’il évoque son amitié avec
, fraichement célibataire et femme bafouée dans son amour, Ryan n’envisage plus aucune relation amoureuse avec quiconque. Alors que son ex, Scarlett Joahnsson, n’a, elle, pas perdu de temps: de quoi enfoncer un peu plus Ryan dans sa peine. La belle a tourné la page et ouvert un autre chapitre de sa vie avec le tombeur quinqua Sean Penn. Une amourette qu’ils ont tenté de garder secrète, peut-être pour le bien de leurs ex respectifs, mais dont la presse s’est aussitôt emparée. Cette même presse que Mister Reynolds remet à sa place: «les médias n’était pas invités à mon mariage, ils ne le seront pas à mon divorce».
Six mois après sa séparation d’avec Scarlett, Ryan dit se sentir «différent» même s’il espère de son côté que son ex restera la même. Parfois effacé dans l’ombre de la célébrité de la belle, le comédien veut sûrement essayer de faire sa place sans n’être plus catalogué «Monsieur Joahnsson».
DreamWorks Animation a imaginé un “Dream Center”, avec des attractions autour de l’animation, des salles de cinéma, des hôtels et des boutiques, qui devrait voir le jour à Shangai en 2016 !
DreamWorks Animation et Oriental DreamWorks (en partenariat avec avec les sociétés publiques chinoises China Media Capital (CMC), Shanghai Media Group (SMG) et Shanghai Alliance Investment (SAI)) inaugureront en 2016 un “Dream Center” dans lequel on trouvera des attractions autour de l’animation, des salles de cinéma Imax, des hôtels et des boutiques… Il sera construit à Shangai, dans le quartier Xuhui. Le coût de l’opération sera de 3,2 milliards de dollars (2,57 mds euros).
Comme le rappelle l’AFP, DreamWorks emboîte ainsi le pas à un autre géant des médias et du divertissement américain, Disney, dont le premier parc d’attraction en Chine continentale, d’un coût de 3,7 milliards de dollars (2,9 mds euros), doit ouvrir en 2015, à Shanghai également.
A sa descente d’un train qui venait de Cologne, Keziah Jones a été interpellé par la police, à la Gare du Nord. N’ayant pas ses papier sur lui, l’artiste nigérian a été conduit au poste où il est resté une heure.
C’est une curieuse mésaventure dont Keziah Jones a été victime mercredi à Paris. Alors qu’il revenait de Cologne, en Allemagne, où il avait donné un concert, le chanteur nigérian a été contrôlé par la police sur le quai de la Gare du Nord, puis embarqué au poste.
L’incident a été révélé sur la page Facebook de Keziah Jones, photos à l’appui. L’artiste a ensuite raconté sa version des faits à Libération.
Il affirme qu’il a proposé à la police de l’accompagner chez lui, où était resté son passeport, et les officiers «ont commencé à (le) bousculer». Il leur demande alors: «Mais qu’est-ce que j’ai fait de mal? Si vous pensez que j’ai fait quelque chose de mal, emmenez moi au poste», les policiers prennent cette proposition au pied de la lettre et l’embarquent.
L’interprète de Rythm is love dit être resté au commissariat environ une heure, au terme de laquelle la police le laissepartir «sans aucune explication, sans excuse, rien. Il aurait presque fallu que ce soit moi qui m’excuse de ne pas avoir le bon look». Le nœud du problème selon lui: Keziah Jones aurait été victime d’un délit de faciès.
Il se souvient d’avoir été le seul passager du train à se faire contrôler: «je suis musicien, je porte un chapeau, des lunettes noires, alors peut-être que j’ai l’air suspect».
En habitué des contrôles de police, assez fréquents lorsqu’il chantait dans les couloirs du métro, le célèbre guitariste se dit très surpris de l’agressivité des officiers: «Quand la police me disait de partir, j’obtempérais. Ils restaient polis, et ce n’était pas une intervention policière au hasard et agressive. C’est la première fois que j’ai affaire à des policiers aussi virulents».
Heureusement, Keziah Jone n’est pas rancunier. Il invite les policiers à vérifier qui il est lors des concerts qu’il doit donner à Paris ce week-end, à la Défense samedi, et aux Solidays dimanche. «Rythm is love baby!».
Les photos de l’interpellation de Keziah Jones, publiées sur sa page Facebook:
Après quatre jours de festival, le jury présidé par a rendu son verdict et décerné ses Valois (les prix remis chaque année à Angoulême).
Et de trois! Trois prix de meilleur film raflés par le film de Valérie Donzelli et Jérémie Elkaïm, La Guerre est déclarée. Après Cabourg et Paris, c’est à Angoulême que ce «drame d’action» a été récompensé.
Dans ce long-métrage qui sortira mercredi en salles, Valérie Donzelli et Jérémie Elkaïm (notre photo), qui ont été ensemble dans la vie, racontent comment ils ont lutté pour la guérison de leur fils atteint d’une tumeur au cerveau. Le film servi par une esthétique très innovante, est traité de façon quasi-joyeuse, mettant l’accent sur l’action que mènent les parents, la solidité de leur relation dans l’épreuve, jusqu’à la guérison de leur enfant. Et même si la réalisatrice et son acteur principal sont aujourd’hui séparés, ils ont voulu montrer comment ils ont accédé à une forme d’entente supérieure.
Le Valois du meilleur acteur revient cette année à
, pour sa prestation époustouflante dans Présumé Coupable, un film adapté du livre qu’a écrit Alain Marécaux, l’un des rescapés d’Outreau sur son calvaire. Pour le film, Philippe Torreton a perdu plus de 20 kilos, il campe la victime du système judiciaire et carcéral français avec une telle force que le jury du festival n’a pu hésiter à le récompenser.
Le Valois de la meilleure actrice sera quant à lui partagé, entre Nadine Labaki, l’actrice libanaise qui porte le film de Georges Hachem, Balle perdue, et la jeune Québécoise Madeleine Peloquin dans Pour l’amour de Dieu.
Le reste du palmarès
Valois du meilleur réalisateur: Pierre Schoeller pour L’Exercice de l’Etat
Valois du court-métrage: La Détente de Pierre Duclos
Valois des étudiants: Pour l’amour de Dieu de Micheline Lanctôt
Valois du public: Présumé Coupable de Vincent Garenq
C.C.
Lundi 29 août 2011
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Franco-German summit also reports progress on financial transaction tax.
The leaders of France and Germany today (19 February) called for sanctions targeting those responsible for violence against demonstrators last night in Ukraine.
“Tomorrow [European Union] foreign ministers are to decide against who the sanctions should be imposed”, said Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. But she warned that “sanctions are not enough: it is necessary to relaunch the political process”.
François Hollande, France’s president, called for “targeted, specific and gradual sanctions” to be imposed following the conclusion of an investigation into who bears responsibility for the violence.
The governments of France and Germany were meeting today in Paris for the 16th France-German summit. Hollande and Merkel will be joined tonight by José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, for a working dinner.
EU foreign ministers will meet tomorrow in Brussels for an emergency meeting to discuss the sudden escalation of violence in Ukraine. Yesterday evening, Ukrainian police laid siege to anti-government protestors occupying Independence Square in central Kiev. A reported 25 people are dead, including several police officers. The protests began after Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president, rejected an association agreement with the EU in November, accepting instead Russian financial aid for Ukraine’s struggling economy.
Herman van Rompuy suggested this morning that the EU could take targeted measures such as “financial sanctions and visa restrictions against those responsible for violence and use of excessive force”.
Speaking today, Hollande said that the EU’s offer of an association agreement with Ukraine still stood.
Taxing issues
The meeting between France and Germany’s leaders and finance ministers nudged forward a controversial European plan to impose a tax on financial transactions.
Merkel and Hollande both expressed their intention that such a tax would be in place ahead of the European Parliament elections, which are to be held in March.
In an apparent breakthrough, the two sides appear to have overcome their disagreement over whether the tax should be applied to derivative transactions, with France arguing that it should not.
Pierre Moscovici, France’s finance minister, indicated this morning that France was prepared to include derivatives in the tax.
Hollande said: “I prefer an imperfect tax over no tax at all”.
The European Commission in February 2013 proposed introducing a tax of at least 0.1% of total value for all shares, bonds and derivatives transactions in the participating member states. Part of the tax receipts would go to the EU as “own resources”. MEPs broadly backed the proposal in July 2013, but it was blocked in the Council.
As a result, a group of eleven member states – namely France, Germany, Greece, Belgium, Estonia, Spain, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia – decided to proceed with the legislation under the rarely-used enhanced co-operation procedure, which could provide for legislation governing only those countries.
Member states unable to agree stance on GM crop request Commission says it is bound to authorise GM maize
European policy on genetically modified crops is on course to return to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), following this week’s failure by member states to settle a request for crop authorisation.
The European Commission said yesterday (12 February) that it would have no option but to authorise a new strain of genetically modified maize, even though approval was supported by only five of the EU’s 28 member states, with 19 opposed and another four abstaining.
Because there was no weighted majority either for authorisation or rejection, a decision on authorisation reverts back to the Commission, which had proposed authorisation back in 2009 following an application by Dupont Pioneer in 2001.
If the Commission does follow its 2009 line – as it says that it is obliged to do – then a challenge at the ECJ will follow.
It was to avoid such an eventuality, inevitable as long as the Council was split on authorisation, that the proposal was not put to a decision until Tuesday (11 February). The delay prompted DuPont Pioneer, the biotech company that developed the GM maize, to mount a challenge at the ECJ, whose judges then ruled in September that the authorisation should be put to a vote within three months of the Commission’s request.
Both sides agree that nothing would have happened with the application had the court not made its ruling. “Nothing was happening before. The breakthrough was the court ruling,” said József Máté, a spokesperson for DuPont Pioneer. “Without it, we would be in the same status now.”
Member states strongly opposed to GM, with France, Austria and Hungary to the fore, are taking legal advice about a possible further challenge if the Commission does go ahead with authorisation. They will argue that under EU law, the Commission must send a request for authorisation back to the beginning of the approval process if new scientific evidence emerges. Since the file was considered by a committee of member state experts back in 2009, two more scientific opinions on the maize have been issued by the European Food Safety Authority.
In December, the EU’s general court annulled the 2010 authorisation of a different genetically modified crop, the Amflora potato. The case was brought by Hungary. The court found that the Commission should have re-started the authorisation process when new EFSA reports were issued. However the Commission says that the current case is different because the additional studies were published before a vote was taken in the Council.
Other authorisation requests are pending. Syngenta has a request for authorisation of GM maize at the same stage in the approval process as was Dupont’s, but a company spokesperson said there were no plans to launch a similar legal challenge. Monsanto also has a handful of applications in the regulatory pipeline, but they are not yet sufficiently advanced to allow the company to take the matter to court.
“I wouldn’t take this as a model, this is a last resort for a product that’s been in the system for over a decade,” said Nathalie Moll, secretary-general of Europabio, the biotech industry association. She said that after several years in which some member states had put in place illegal national bans on the one GM crop approved for cultivation, Tuesday’s Council meeting had focused on what is legally possible.
Experts agree that the ECJ has already shown that it is not afraid to be seen as ‘legislating from the bench’, even on very sensitive issues.
Takis Tridimas, an expert in European Union law at Matrix Chambers in London, said that while the court had always been selectively active and sometimes found itself making policy, there was a risk of a backlash when the issue was very high-profile. He likened the GM controversy to a court ruling on a law over tobacco advertising, but said that the GM issue had even greater resonance.
Mute Schimpf, an anti-GM campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said that the courts were not the best forum to settle this issue. “The hesitation to take responsibility, from member states and the Commission, is what has necessitated all of the court cases,” she said. “The Commission says this should be about science not politics. But this is a political decision. It’s up to our politicians to take decisions implementing public opinion.”
Member states are split over plans to revamp the EU’s rules on country-of-origin labels
The European Union’s patchwork of overlapping and ill-enforced rules on product safety and traceability are in dire need of harmonisation. Cue a proposal from the European Commission in February 2013. Yet, after almost a year of negotiations, the failure of member states to agree on one aspect, namely a rule that would require consumer goods to carry country-of-origin labels, makes the adoption of the proposal unlikely before the European Parliament elections in May.
Under the proposal, manufacturers can choose between affixing a “made in the European Union” label or a country-of-origin label. MEPs in October broadly backed this approach, in spite of a split between MEPs along a north-south divide.
Greece, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers, is expected to present a new compromise on Friday (31 January), but member states appear to have split into two blocking minorities. The latest options are either limiting the country-of-origin rules to higher risk products – such as textiles and toys – or instructing the Commission to undertake an impact assessment of the rule’s effect on businesses with a view to a future proposal.
For the Commission, France, Italy, Portugal and other supporters, country-of-origin labels would substantially improve the traceability of goods and product safety. Around 10% of dangerous consumer goods logged by the EU’s market surveillance system cannot be traced back to the manufacturer, according to the Commission. Knowing in which country a defective toy was made would help authorities from that country to identify the manufacturer more quickly.
But rules of origin are not only about product safety: they could have a significant effect on branding. They have won support among sectors seeking to protect their identity at a national level. For example, non-Italian firms could no longer use “Italian-sounding names” to boost trade via a supposed link to Italy, says the Italian ceramics industry body. But critics of the country-of-origin rule, led by Germany and the United Kingdom, see the proposal as a covert attempt to bolster the industries of southern EU member states, where production processes tend to be simpler and less globalised, at the expense of northern European manufacturers.
Country-of-origin labels are misleading in the case of complex products, they argue, with the support of two leading EU consumer groups. It is neither correct nor fair to say that a consumer product designed in Germany with parts sourced from several countries and assembled in India is “made in India”, the detractors maintain.
They also point to rulings from the EU courts that have held that country-of-origin labels hinder trade between member states by allowing consumers “to assert any prejudices which they may have against foreign products”.
But the dispute is holding up reforms that industry describes as much-needed. It is “unacceptable” that a dispute over country-of-origin rules has brought the Commission’s plan to deepen the single market and remove barriers to trade to a position of “stalemate, thus making our companies collateral victims”, associations representing European machinery manufacturers told member state governments in a letter on 20 January. “In the meanwhile, they continue to face major problems due to unfair competition with non-conforming products on the EU market.”
The Commission’s proposal was presented by Antonio Tajani, the European commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship, who is from Italy, and Tonio Borg, then the European commissioner for health and consumer policy, who is from Malta, in February 2013. (Responsibility for consumer policy has since been given to Neven Mimica, Croatia’s European commissioner.)
Detractors say that the ‘made-in’ label rules were added only at the last minute after member states – led by Germany and the UK – rejected a similar rule in a trade proposal, a point they say is supported by the Commission not having undertaken an impact assessment.
EBU debate will be aired by national broadcasters across Europe.
A live television debate between candidates for the presidency of the European Commission will take place on 14 May, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has confirmed today (29 January). The debate will come one week before the European Parliament elections, which are to be held on 22-25 May.
The debate will pit the nominees of each of the transnational European political families against one another. EBU will distribute the debate to its members, which are public service broadcasters such as the BBC, RAI and TF1. It will start at 9pm that evening, but broadcasters can choose whether to show it live or recorded.
European political parties are this year nominating candidates for the position of European Commission president in a bid to increase interest in the European Parliament elections. While it is the member state governments who appoint the Commission president, their choice must be confirmed by the European Parliament. Proponents of the new system say member states should appoint the candidate of whichever group receives the most votes in May’s election.
Some member state leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have poured cold water on this idea. But the Parliament may refuse to confirm the nominee if the member states choose to ignore the new system.
The Party of European Socialists (PES) is set to choose German MEP Martin Schulz as its nominee, while the European Liberals (ALDE) are expected to nominate Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt. Far-left Greek MP Alex Tsipras has been chosen to represent the far-left GUE group. The centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) will choose its candidate at a nominating convention in Dublin on 7 March. The Greens concluded an open primary to select their nominees yesterday (28 January), and the result will be announced today.
Despite initial rumours that the EBU would invite the nominees of only the biggest three political parties, a spokesperson said last week that it would “invite a range of candidates once their names are announced and we expect five or perhaps six debaters to participate”.
Inviting the nominees from the smaller groups could prove problematic. The Eurosceptic European for Freedom and Democracy (EFD) and Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR) groups so far have no intention of fielding candidates, but may change their mind. The Green group have defiantly chosen to nominate two candidates for the single position of European Commission president.
The organisers are hoping that the candidates will all speak in English so that the programme will not be burdened with awkward lags for interpretation. However, this being an international union, the nominees will be guaranteed the right to speak in their own language if they so choose.
The EBU debate is only one of a handful being organised. The University of Maastricht is holding a debate for the nominees on 28 April. That debate will be live-streamed on the web.