Word: var
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Just before announcing the awards on the closing night of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, Sean Penn, the president of this year's jury, recalled that he had once served in the same post at another festival. He'd run into Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who exclaimed, "Sean Penn, can you believe you're the president of anything?" The actor-director, a longtime critic of George W. Bush, then told the black-tie audience, "And I'm not the only president whose answer should be 'no.' " The crowd erupted into the applause of political solidarity...
...Recent star inductees have included Barbra Streisand, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery, joining such existing "legionnaires" as Robert De Niro, Pedro Almodóvar, Quincy Jones and Michelle Yeoh. Each may be a fine exponent of his or her craft, but none exactly rises to the Napoleonic standard of heroism. Even Wednesday's upgrade of Steven Spielberg from knight to officer grade in the Legion for "the body of his works, and his engagement for great causes like the memory of the Shoah and the conflict in Darfur" wasn't entirely in line with the institution's original objective...
...simply reflected in the nationality of its creative spirits, but also in the capacity of a country to welcome other cultures. France has a considerable lead here, having opened its arms to so many such creative spirits from all over the world. Many of Pedro Almodóvar's and Emir Kusturica's films, as well as those by African filmmakers, are jointly produced by our country...
Venezuela's 26 million people have seen four straight years of near record economic growth, and they are driving up domestic oil demand: almost 500,000 new cars are expected to be sold this year. (Why not, with gas at 12˘ a gal.?) But the bolívar is sharply overvalued, inflation is the highest in Latin America, and even Chávez fears that his "21st century socialists" are living like capitalist nouveaux riches, the so-called boli-bourgeoisie...
...populist challenge to "imperialist" threats - and what more convenient symbol of colonial oppression for Chávez (besides his favorite, the U.S.) than the Spanish throne, which plundered South America for three centuries before it was thrown out in the 1800s by Venezuelan "Liberator" Simón Bolívar, the namesake of Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution...