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(Courtesy of Monocle) She is actually 1st of 5 people Monocle profiled for "city voices" for their July/August issue.

MONTREAL - Actor Michael Douglas has volunteered to serve as the star attraction in May at a Montreal fundraiser for cancer research. Douglas has stepped forward to assist with this year's event, the 17th annual Head and Neck Cancer Fundraiser, held by the Department of Otolaryngology of the McGill University Department of Medicine. It is scheduled for May 3 at Le Windsor, on Peel St. in downtown Montreal, according to the calendar of coming events at the Jewish General Hospital - where, according to the actor's publicist, his recent case of throat cancer was diagnosed after other physicians had missed it.. "It was his very gracious offer to help us in view of his own battle with throat cancer," Dr. Saul Frenkiel was quoted Monday night by the Canadian Press news agency. Frenkiel, a head and neck surgeon who is the event's co-chairman, could not be reached for an interview by The Gazette. Douglas owns a vacation property in the Mont Tremblant resort area in the Laurentians. Tickets to the dinner have been priced at $375 each. VIP tickets are $750. © Copyright © The Montreal Gazette http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Michael+Douglas+star+cancer+fundraiser/4639105/story.html

Going to spend a few days iin Toronto soon. I need recommandations on a good downtown hotel............in the 4 star range.............well situated downtown....good view...tall building....good price.

Pierre Karl Péladeau mise gros sur Star Académie et son directeur invité René Angélil pour relancer les revenus de la division «loisir et divertissement» de Quebecor, qui ont chuté de 22% au deuxième trimestre. Pour en lire plus...

Bernier a dépensé 22 573 $ pour un billet d'avion Le ministre des Affaires étrangères, Maxime Bernier. Photo PC La Presse Canadienne Toronto Le ministre des Affaires étrangères, Maxime Bernier, et son équipe ont dépensé des dizaines de milliers de dollars en frais de voyage pour assister à une conférence de deux jours au Laos l'an dernier. Le Toronto Star rapporte que le vol du ministre a coûté 22 573 $, avec une escale à Paris. Le journal affirme avoir étudié le prix des billets d'avion pour l'Asie du Sud-Est et prétend que M. Bernier aurait pu voyager confortablement vers le Laos pour moins de 7000 $. Selon les dossier mis en ligne dans le site du ministère des Affaires étrangères, trois membres du personnel du ministre étaient eux aussi du voyage: le vol de deux d'entre eux aurait coûté 18 500 $ chacun, alors que celui du troisième n'aurait coûté que 2676 $. Le vol de M. Bernier constitue le vol le plus cher d'un ministre ou d'un représentant officiel depuis que Stephen Harper est arrivé au pouvoir il y a deux ans, selon le Star, qui a passé en revue les documents comptables du gouvernement. Le directeur des communications du ministre Bernier, Neil Hrab, a indiqué au quotidien torontois que son ministère étudiait actuellement les rapports de dépense. http://www.cyberpresse.ca/article/20080516/CPACTUALITES/80516264/1019/CPACTUALITES

Revisiting Drapeau's personal Versaille Alan Richman, National Post Published: Friday, January 25, 2008 Story Tools Gordon Beck/Canwest News Service The Olympic Stadium adds grandeur to a part of Montreal that is woefully lacking in it, even if it is too large and impractical for just about every sport, including baseball, the sport played there ... Having once worked simultaneously as both the sports columnist and the restaurant critic for the long-defunct Montreal Star - employing a sportswriter as a restaurant critic might well have contributed to its demise - I am used to my commentary being greeted with derision from numerous walks of life. Nothing I said then might equal the mockery I anticipate from what I am about to say now. I take a deep breath. I ask: Is it possible that the Montreal Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Games, is an enduring work of art? I have always loathed the stadium, but not for esthetic reasons. I have hated it for far longer than is healthy for a man to despise an inanimate object, entirely because of what the stadium represented: Greed. Extravagance. Envy. Pride. That's more than half the original seven deadly sins. I don't include gluttony, simply because I recall the smoked meat sold during athletic events as being ordinary. I disliked the stadium because of the considerable pain and suffering it caused the city and the province. It infamously cost about $1-billion, and we're talking 1970s dollars. It was wrong for the climate, forever showing water stains, like a suede jacket worn in the rain. It is no longer utilized in winter, because engineers worry it might not be able to withstand the weight of a significant snowfall. It's too large for just about any legitimate sports event except the opening and closing ceremonies of an Olympic Games. The one sport that was played there most often, professional baseball, didn't fit. Famously, the retractable roof never worked properly. The space was finally covered with some kind of hideous fabric. It reminds me of a tarp thrown over a sports car parked out of doors. I have one fond memory of covering an event there. I was standing in line for free food in the press room during the 1976 Olympics. Mick Jagger was in front of me, wearing a lime-green suit with a cigarette burn in the shoulder, looking like a guy who needed free food. A few days later he would send a note down to the field during the women's pentathlon, trying to meet Diane Jones, a member of the Canadian team. I left Montreal in 1977, a year after the Olympics had nearly bankrupted the province of Quebec, so the problems that kept popping up were no longer of concern to me. I stopped covering events, except as an occasional visiting sportswriter. I no longer paid income taxes to the province, so I stopped feeling cheated by the cost overruns. My bad attitude lingered on, though. In 1975 and '76, when I was the sports columnist for the Star, I had written often and angrily about the abuses that were permitted - I should say promulgated - by the city government. I recall being consumed with outrage when two workers died in an accident on the job, and Mayor Jean Drapeau justified the deaths by pointing out that in construction-deaths-per-dollar-spent, the stadium lagged behind virtually every other major project. From then on, I was in a rage. I couldn't really decide whether the mayor or the stadium was the more irrational piece of work. I shouldn't have blamed the government for everything. Let's not forget the unionized workers who built the place. Knowing of the alarmingly tight deadline, they responded with strikes, walkouts and protests. When those led to a crisis, they demanded more money for having to work so hard. The stadium was so impractical, so ridiculous and so wrong-headed that I never considered the possibility that it might be beautiful. Drapeau had it built by French architect Roger Taillibert, calling his works "poems in concrete." To me, the stadium was blank verse. Drapeau was no longer at the peak of his powers when he commissioned it. He was out of touch with practicality. But he was also something of a visionary, successor to the French profligates who built the great tourist attractions of France. The Olympic Stadium was his Versailles. A few months ago, on a visit to Montreal, I was driving through the eastern part of the city in search of a trendy restaurant: Nothing trendy ever happened in the eastern part of Montreal when I lived there. I drove past the stadium. It was sunset, and it seemed to glow. I was caught up in the gracefulness of its sweeping, melodious lines. I thought it was stunning, capable of taking flight. Others have called it a toilet bowl. Writer Josh Freed once said, "It killed the Olympics. It killed baseball and city finances. Please, let's take it down before it kills again." My old pal Mike Boone, who worked with me on the Montreal Star and is now city columnist for the Montreal Gazette, recently reminded me that baseball players never liked it, either. He recalls Ross Grimsley, a pitcher who once won 20 games for the Montreal Expos, telling him, "I was looking for the locker room. I walked a hundred miles, down corridors that didn't lead anywhere." Boone calls the stadium "a bidet with a dildo attached to it." I now think of it as Starship Drapeau. I risk being thought as addled as Drapeau when I say this: shortsighted, all of them. To be fair, even Boone concedes that if you drive up to the eastern lookout on Mount Royal, park your car and look east when the stadium is lit up, it does look lovely at a distance. I don't know if this entered into Drapeau's thoughts, but that part of Montreal is woefully lacking in grandeur, and the stadium provides what little there is. Drapeau believed that great cities needed spectacular monuments. He had wanted a symbolic structure built for his enormously successful Expo 67, but never got the building because it would have cost too much: $22-million. That's about a 50th of what the Olympic Stadium finally cost. Had he been successful in the '60s, the Montreal Olympics might not have been such a fiscal tragedy in the '70s. Of course, the stadium has been a disaster. It remains one. In 1991, a 55-ton concrete beam fell, not killing anybody, an unexpected break. In 1997, the province spent about $40-million for a new roof that was supposed to last 50 years. It soon ripped. Canadians should start thinking of the stadium as a great old pile. Sure it's obsolete, drafty and ruinous. So are castles in France. But if it hadn't been so terrible, it wouldn't be nearly so fascinating. http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=264191

Montreal gladly reclaims its 'Hollywood North' tag BRENDAN KELLY, The Gazette Published: Thursday, May 10, 2007 It's amazing what a little labour peace can do for the film business. Only two months after a long, bitter dispute between two rival film technicians unions was finally resolved, local movie folks are positively euphoric as they gear up for their busiest period of Hollywood shooting in years. Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Evangeline Lilly and John Malkovich are all on their way to shoot in Montreal in the coming weeks, and Hans Fraikin - film commissioner at the Quebec Film and Television Council - said Hollywood filming in the city is definitely going to top last year's tally of $150 million. He thinks the total might actually inch toward the $200-million mark and he said the boom is directly tied to the resolution in late February of the feud between the Alliance quebecoise des techniciens de l'image et du son (AQTIS), the local film union, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), an American union. They were fighting over who should represent the province's film workers. Cate Blanchett: with Brad Pitt. "We were close to total industrial implosion at the beginning of the year," Fraikin said. "It was Armageddon. Now it's looking healthier than expected. But we worked hard on resolving the conflict and convincing people that Quebec was open for business again. And it's paying off." Local industry players got news this week that Death Race 3000 will be produced here. This is a remake of the 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000 that starred David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone in a story set in the future about a violent road race that takes place between New York and Los Angeles. The remake will star British actor Jason Statham and is being produced by Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. The other recent addition to the local film-shoot lineup is Get Smart, the big-screen adaptation of the classic 1960s spy-spoof TV series. Carell will star as goofball secret agent Maxwell Smart, Hathaway will play sultry Agent 99, and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson will play Agent 23, a newly created character. The producers will shoot only a part of the film here, spending around 20 days in town next month. Pitt and Blanchett will be here for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a Paramount production directed by David Fincher and adapted from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a man who begins to age backwards. That film has already wrapped several months of shooting in New Orleans, and the filmmakers will be here for just eight days at the end of month. They will be filming Old Montreal as Paris and Moscow in winter, which will entail importing huge amounts of artificial snow. Far and away the biggest shoot on the way is The Mummy 3. The crew is already in pre-production for the third instalment in the Mummy series, which begins filming here July 27 and is expected to occupy several sound stages at Mel's Cite du Cinema studio right through to the end of the year. It is estimated that the producers will hire between 800 and 900 local technicians to work on the Universal Pictures project. Brendan Fraser - who was here last summer shooting a new version of Journey to the Center of the Earth - reprises his role as adventurer Rick O'Connell, but Rachel Weisz, who played his wife, will not be on board this time. Action star Jet Li will play the mummy, Michelle Yeoh plays a wizard, and 26-year-old Australian thespian Luke Ford will join the series as O'Connell's son. Filming will continue in China after the Montreal shoot. Kate Beckinsale has been here for a few weeks shooting Whiteout, a thriller about a U.S. marshal hunting a killer in Antarctica, and production has been under way here since late March on the U.S.A. Network series The Dead Zone, which stars Anthony Michael Hall. Alberta-born Lost star Lilly and Malkovich are due here in early June for Afterwards, a Canada-France co-production that co-stars Moliere lead Romain Duris. Brian Baker, business agent at the Quebec branch of the Directors Guild of Canada, said that one reason filming is booming is because the Hollywood producers are ramping up production to stockpile films in case of labour unrest in Hollywood next year. There is widespread speculation that both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America could go on strike in 2008. "But that's not the whole story (behind the Montreal boom) because they're dying in Toronto," Baker said. Fraikin said the shoots are back in our city because the labour issues have been settled. "No producer is going to go anywhere near an unstable industrial environment," Fraikin said. "They can't take the risk." It also helped that two of the bigger hits of the first half of the year, 300 and Blades of Glory, were both shot at least in part here, reminding Hollywood producers that Montreal is a good location. bkelly@thegazette.canwest.com