“Hansel and Gretel” is Grimm news for weekend box-office rivals

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Hansel and Gretel,” a Grimm’s fairy tale on special effects and 3D steroids, is ready to wreak some box-office havoc this weekend on its way to the number one spot.

Paramount has exerted considerable marketing muscle behind the R-rated action fantasy, and it seems to be connecting. “Hansel and Gretel” will take in more than $ 25 million over the three days, industry analysts say. Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton play bounty hunters tracking and killing witches all over the world in this version of the classic fairy tale,

The weekend’s other wide openers, the ensemble sketch comedy “Movie 43″ and the Jason Statham-Jennifer Lopez crime thriller “Parker,” don’t figure to be among the leaders.

Last week’s top film, Universal’s horror thriller “Mama,” starring Jessica Chastain, is likely to take a hit from “Hansel and Gretel” but should still finish among the leaders. Best Picture Oscar nominees “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Silver Linings Playbook” will continue to be in the mix, too.

Renner’s star is rising on the heels of “The Avengers” and “The Bourne Legacy,” but the best thing “Hansel and Gretel” will have going for it at the box office might be the bump it will get from premium pricing at its 3D and Imax locations. Paramount has its first 2013 release in roughly 3,300 locations, a whopping 2,900 of which are 3D, and in 300 Imax theaters.

What could work against “Hansel and Gretel” is its R-rating, which will limit its reach with younger fan boys, but late tracking suggests the film’s appeal has broadened. Paramount is also opening “Hansel and Gretel” in 19 foreign markets this weekend, and a solid overseas performance will be critical if it’s to offset its roughly $ 50 million budget.

“Hansel and Gretel,” a co-production of Paramount and MGM, was written and directed by Tommy Wirkola (“Dead Snow”) and co-stars Famke Janssen and Thomas Mann. The film is produced by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Kevin Messick and Beau Flynn.

“Movie 43″ is unlike anything to hit the box office recently. Proudly rude and crude, Relativity‘s R-rated ensemble sketch comedy took four years to make and has 12 directors and twice that many stars.

The cast of “Movie 43″ features Oscar nominees Hugh Jackman and Naomi Watts, along with Seth MacFarlane, Halle Berry, Common, Richard Gere, Greg Kinnear, Kate Winslet, Uma Thurman, Emma Stone, Chloe Grace Moretz, Gerard Butler, Dennis Quaid, Sean William Scott, Kristen Bell and Elizabeth Banks. That’s a lot of star wattage but most of the roles are cameos.

Also appearing are Anna Faris, Liev Schreiber, Johnny Knoxville, Kieran Culkin, Kate Bosworth, Bobby Carnavale, Will Sasso, Josh Duhamel, Snooki and … you get the idea. The budget was just $ 6 million, so everyone worked for scale.

Even the sketches were solicited from agencies, actors and friends and came in the form of treatments, scripts and phone pitches.

Peter Farrelly (“Shallow Hal”), who put the project together along with Charles Wessler, a producer on most of the Farrelly brothers films, directs one of the segments. Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Patrik Forsberg, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, Brett Ratner and Jonathan van Tulleken direct the others.

“It was really all about schedule with a lot of these people,” Farrelly said. “Charlie would call and they’d say, ‘Yeah, I’d love to do it, but I’m in the middle of a movie. I can do it in nine months, next September.’ And he’d just go, ‘Fine, we’ll see you in September.’ That’s why this film took four years to make – it wasn’t sitting on shelf somewhere. We’d get who we’d get when we’d get them, and that’s how it worked.”

The sketches are tied together by a storyline involving a down-and-out movie producer (Quaid), who’s pitching projects to a studio exec (Kinnear) and his boss (Common). The shorts ensue.

There haven’t been press screenings, so the critics haven’t gotten their hands on it. It’s hard to tell from the red-band trailer how funny the film will be, but there’s little doubt some will be offended – we’re not talking “Love Actually” here – by the raunch and low-brow humor.

That’s intended to be part of the appeal, of course, but points up a box-office conundrum: how successful can a film be when a large part of the audience most likely to most enjoy those kind of laughs can’t get in because of the R rating? Relativity is banking on 18-34-year-olds, and analysts and the studio see it making around $ 8 million or $ 9 million over the three days.

The film has already made more than its budget in the foreign pre-sales, which were handled by Lionsgate International. It’s among the first releases overseen by Relativity‘s new international distribution unit, Relativity International, and has taken in approximately $ 8.5 million since opening earlier this month in Russia.

In “Parker,” directed by Taylor Hackford (“Ray”), Statham plays a professional thief with a conscience, who doesn’t steal from the poor or hurt innocent people. Double-crossed after a gang heist, he heads to Palm Beach, Fla., and teams with one of their victims (Lopez) for revenge.

The presence of Lopez, who has a major music fan base, provides something of an X factor for “Parker.” She hasn’t been seen in a box-office hit since 2005′s “Monster In Law,” but her voice helped “Ice Age: Continental Drift” ring up $ 875 million worldwide last year.

Statham’s last movie was the ensemble action film “Expendables 2,” which opened to $ 28 million and went on to make $ 85 million last year. But the tracking and social media hasn’t been strong, and “Parker” will be hard-pressed to match the performance of Staham’s 2011 film “The Mechanic,” which opened to $ 11 million and made $ 29 million. Film District has it in 2,224 locations.

John J. McLaughlin adapted the script from “Flashfire,” the 19th “Parker” novel, written by Donald Westlake under the name Richard Stark.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: Time to Recognize Mild Cognitive Disorder?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published and periodically updated by the American Psychiatric Association, is one of those documents few laypeople ever read, but many of us are affected by.

It can make it easier or harder to get an insurance company or Medicare to cover treatments, for example. It factors into a variety of legal and governmental decisions.

And on a personal basis, a psychiatric diagnosis may be welcome (having a name and a treatment plan for what’s bothering us can be comforting) or not (are we really suffering from a mental disorder if we seem depressed after a family member dies?).

That last question refers to a change in the new DSM5, to be published in May, that has generated considerable controversy and that I discussed in an earlier post: the removal of the “bereavement exclusion,” once part of the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder.

Another element of the revised DSM could also affect readers: It will include something called Mild Neurocognitive Disorder. The task force revising the manual wanted to align psychiatry with the rest of medicine, which has already begun to distinguish between levels of impairment, said its chairman, David Kupfer, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist.

True enough, as we have reported before. Neurologists call it Mild Cognitive Impairment, a stage where cognitive decline becomes noticeable enough to affect daily functioning, yet people can still live independently and have not progressed to dementia.

In fact, a large proportion of people with mild cognitive problems never will develop dementia — but doctors and researchers cannot yet determine who will and who won’t. Biomarkers that could identify the biological brain changes that presage dementia are still years away.

Will it be helpful, then, for health professionals using the DSM5 — most of them not psychiatrists, but primary care doctors — to begin diagnosing Mild Neurocognitive Disorder? Particularly as there is no treatment that can reverse it or reliably slow its progression, if it would progress?

Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a member of the working group that developed the new DSM5 criteria, said he thought the newly recognized disorder would be useful. “The predementia phase is becoming increasingly important,” he told me in an interview.

Counseling could help people compensate for the memory loss and other deficits they are experiencing, for example. With a DSM-recognized diagnosis, those approaches are more likely to be covered by insurers.

Besides, “one argument against Alzheimer’s therapies is that we wait too late, when there’s too much damage to the central nervous system to repair,” Dr. Petersen said, referring to several recent disappointing drug trials. In the future, with earlier diagnoses, “you may be able to intervene, stop the process and forestall the dementia.”

But as we have seen with screening tests for other diseases, early detection does not always lead to better health or longer lives. It can, however, lead to unnecessary treatments and procedures involving risks of their own. Could that happen with Mild Neurocognitive Disorder?

“It will lead to wild overdiagnosis,” predicted Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke and the chairman of the task force that developed the previous DSM edition. Indeed, about a quarter of people initially diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment are later determined to be normal, a prominent researcher told my colleague Judy Graham last year.

“People will get unnecessary tests and start getting weird treatments that have no proven efficacy,” said Dr. Frances, who has criticized a number of DSM5 changes. “They’re going to worry like crazy about being demented.”

Dr. Petersen agreed that it was a legitimate concern, but “by and large, we’re becoming better at distinguishing between the normal cognitive effects of aging and disease.” (The American Psychiatric Association will publish a specialized DSM for primary care physicians, Dr. Kupfer pointed out, to help guide them through diagnoses.)

It is hard for patients and families to know how to react when experts disagree. But keep in mind that contemporary health care aims for what is called shared decision-making. That means patients and professionals discuss options and weigh the risks and benefits of treatments and procedures, their likely outcomes, patients’ preferences, and come to agreement on how to proceed. This essay in the New England Journal of Medicine calls shared decision-making “the pinnacle of patient-centered care.”

So when Dr. Frances refers to the DSM5 as “a guide, not a bible,” and urges skepticism about some of its diagnoses, he is advocating an approach that patients and families should probably bring to any medical decision.

Seeking further information, asking questions, assessing options — those are reasonable responses if, a few weeks after a loved one’s death, a doctor says you may have major depression. Or if she thinks your memory loss could mean Mild Neurocognitive Disorder.

“The shorter the evaluation, the less the person knows you, the less he or she can explain and justify the diagnosis, the more tests and treatments that will result, the more a person should be cautious and get a second opinion,” Dr. Frances said.

Whatever the DSM5 says, it’s hard to argue with that.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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ENI Makes a Push Toward the Top of Oil and Gas

MILAN — Tucked away in a building on the outskirts of Milan is the “nirvana room,” so called perhaps because of the good tidings it contains. There, geologists working for the Italian oil company ENI don 3-D glasses to contemplate day-glow images of underground geological formations and try to divine which might be worth tens of millions of dollars in exploratory drilling.

The mood around ENI has been nirvana-like lately as the company’s explorers have made some lucrative enlightened guesses. Beginning in 2010, ENI and a rival, the Houston-based Anadarko Petroleum, made a series of finds off Mozambique, a country in East Africa, that add up to the largest natural gas trove of recent years — the equivalent of about 16 billion barrels of oil.

ENI controls the largest share of the Mozambique findings, with 70 percent of an offshore block in the Indian Ocean called Area 4, in what is known as the Rovuma Basin.

ENI’s chief executive, Paolo Scaroni, said that the discoveries had come after ENI spent five years studying East Africa, where very little oil and natural gas had been found. When Mozambique made exploration blocks available in 2006, ENI bid and got the one it wanted.

These days, oil and natural gas exploration is an industry as fraught with geopolitical risks as it is with geological ones, of course, as the recent hostage-taking attack in Algeria has made clear. And ENI is as aware as any European energy company of the dangers of politically volatile North Africa, given its own extensive operations in Algeria and Libya.

But for now, at least, Mozambique is not one of Africa’s trouble spots. And in any case, energy companies tend to follow opportunities wherever they can find them.

“Although Mozambique was a new country, we thought the chances were reasonable, about 20 percent,” of finding something, Mr. Scaroni said during an interview in Milan. “Of course it was high-risk, high-reward.”

It was after Anadarko, a U.S. independent, announced a discovery in an adjacent tract that ENI, which had been preparing to drill in another part of its block, decided to put its first well near Anadarko’s tract.

Mr. Scaroni, a graduate of Columbia Business School in New York with a master’s degree in business administration, took the top job at ENI in 2005 after spending much of his career outside Italy and the oil business. He has been gradually reshaping the company into more of a machine for finding and producing oil and natural gas and less of the lumbering state conglomerate that had toiled in the second tier of global oil giants.

Mr. Scaroni, 66, also has the crucial task of maintaining ENI’s relationships with a group of fossil-fuel-rich but prickly host countries that include Iraq, Libya, Russia, Venezuela and, elsewhere in Africa, Angola and the Republic of Congo. He regularly turns up in places like Baghdad or Brazzaville that might give other chief executives pause.

During the interview, the Zubair field in Iraq was on his mind. “We have a company with 150 expatriates in Iraq, with a huge effort for security, and the economic result for us is very little, since we are paid $2 per barrel,” he said. “From time to time, we ask ourselves: Is it worth it?”

ENI is the largest foreign producer of oil and gas in both Algeria and Libya. ENI executives say they were surprised and shocked by what happened to BP and Statoil, which are partners in the Algerian plant that was seized, and are tightening up their own security measures. They note that ENI already has large numbers of Algerian troops inside the perimeters of its Algerian sites, while troops apparently were not posted inside the seized complex at In Amenas.

So far, Mr. Scaroni has smoothly sailed ENI through Libya’s chaotic transition from the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to a new government that is still trying to find its balance. Unlike most other oil companies, ENI thrived under the Qaddafi regime, developing new fields and building a $9 billion facility at Mellitah, west of Tripoli, to pipe natural gas under the Mediterranean.

Mr. Scaroni was quick to go to Benghazi in April 2011 to meet the rebel leadership, even before Colonel Qaddafi’s fall. Since then, ENI has restored most of its Libyan production, which represents 14 percent of ENI’s oil and natural gas output.

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California unions grow, bucking U.S. trend

The latest snapshot of the U.S. working class shows that unions are in trouble, their ranks thinning amid a backlash against organized labor and a still sputtering economy.

But California and a few nearby states in the Southwest are showing a vastly different picture — labor's ranks are on an upswing. The Golden State's union organizers signed up more than 100,000 new members last year, while the nation as a whole shed 400,000, according to data released Wednesday.

The reason: Latino workers.

After working hard to get here, many Latino immigrants demand respect in the workplace and are more willing to join unions in a tough economic environment, organizers say.

"There's an appetite among these low-wage workers to try and get a collective voice to give themselves opportunity and a middle-class lifestyle," said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation.

Just 12.5% of the workforce was represented by unions nationwide in 2012, down from 13% the year before. But 18.4% of California's workforce was represented by a union last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The nation is paying attention to labor's ability to gain traction in states such as California.

Strong membership in California could help unions negotiate higher wages, lobby the Legislature and fend off anti-labor attacks that have become common in the Midwest. Unions in once pro-labor states like Wisconsin and Michigan have been put on the defensive by legislation aimed at eroding the bargaining power of public-sector unions.

Labor's more optimistic proponents say that California could serve as a blueprint for unions across the country as they seek to stem membership declines. The trend comes amid forecasts that the Latino population in the U.S. is likely to double in two decades.

"This has a lot to do with the changing demographics of the workforce in these states," said Ruben Garcia, a labor law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. "The big campaigns in the carwash industry in L.A., the janitors in Houston and the people who work on the Strip here tend to be an immigrant Latino workforce that's willing to stand up at the workplace, sometimes with great risks."

Workers fed up with years of stagnant wages may be motivated to join a union for financial reasons. Last year, union members made $943 a week, on average, while non-union members made $742, according to the BLS.

With the economy still shaky, many California workers are also looking for more job security.

Jackie McKay, 48, is one of the new crop of California union members. A nurse in the intensive-care unit at Community Hospital Long Beach, McKay said she and colleagues decided to try to organize after a new company took over the hospital and nurses weren't comfortable with the way they were being treated.

"We were sort of seeking out someone that we felt was on our side," she said. "We needed some backup."

The Long Beach nurses voted 94 to 30 to unionize in December.

"California is doing far better than most other states and far better than the national trend" in union membership, said John Logan, a professor of labor and employment at San Francisco State University. "Unions have had both dynamic organizing efforts and very effective political influence."

Employees are often hesitant to do anything risky at work when the economy is bad and jobs are scarce. Organizers say they were successful because they harnessed frustration with growing nationwide inequality to engage members during the recession.

"To be successful in organizing unions in the United States in 2013, it's not enough just to appeal to workers on the basis of their own individual problems," said David Johnson, organizing director of the California Nurses Assn., which added five new hospitals last year. "There has to be a broader vision set forth so that people see unions and the labor movement as an answer to the corporate domination and the Wall Street greed that has devastated our country."

Still, the labor movement faces significant challenges in applying moderate successes in California to the rest of the country.

Michigan and Indiana both became "right to work" states last year, meaning unions can't collect dues as a condition of employment. Legislators in Wisconsin and Ohio recently supported bills restricting the bargaining rights of public-sector unions, though the law in Ohio was reversed by referendum.

Those actions were reflected in the numbers put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage of people represented by unions last year in Wisconsin fell to 12%, from 14.1% in 2011, while Indiana experienced a significant drop in union membership, to 10% of the workforce, from 12.4% the previous year.

Union membership fell fairly consistently in Rust Belt states as manufacturing jobs, once a labor stronghold, were sent overseas. The decline in unionized manufacturing isn't likely to shift as companies make efforts to return manufacturing to the United States. Auto companies, for instance, have built new plants in the South, an area traditionally resistant to unionization.

Unions don't have the same appeal to workers who change jobs frequently and think of themselves as independent workers, said Michael Lotito, a partner at the labor law firm Littler Mendelson.

"Unions are really struggling to find a message that resonates with individuals such as it did with my father's generation," he said.

But demographic shifts can be only positive for unions in the next few years, said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at UC Berkeley. Labor has built new alliances and is going into a new, proactive phase, he said.

"Reports of labor's death have been greatly exaggerated," he said.

alana.semuels@latimes.com

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Lookin' Hot in the Cold: Technical Outerwear for Winter

Winter outerwear has come a long way from the clammy straight-jackets your mom would wrap around you every time you wanted to go outside.

Every year, we see jackets, shells, bibs and pants that are more breathable, lighter, stretchier, and just plain better-looking than last year's crop.

We sifted through the countless options on the racks and selected a dozen or so favorite items, then took the whole pile of gear with us to Squaw Valley in California's Lake Tahoe region. We worked them over on the slopes for three days, then took the lot deeper into to the Sierras for another week. We also tried to pick something for everyone -- from Gore-Tex jeans (pre-distressed!) to a snow shell that costs as much as a mortgage payment, and even a down jacket hand-stuffed by followers of a 16th-century pacifist. It's going to be a weird, Wired winter.

The Phenomenon jacket from Spyder is pretty much what would happen if you said, "Screw the cost, let's make a jacket with the best materials we can find." The list of what went into the $1,200 garment looks like the textile version of the Robb Report.

The waterproof membrane is made of Schoeller c-change, which opens its pores to vent heat and moisture when the interior warms up. Custom-embossed stretch polyester lines the interior. Primaloft One insulation lines the body and sleeves. And the outer shell is composed of DWR-treated stretch polyester material with wool accents. Premium!

It was warm, waterproof and comfortable on the slopes, with no movement restricted, plenty of waterproof zip pockets and ventilation, and so many features, I actually lost track of everything that was special about it while I was showing it off to people. To top it all off, the jacket looks like money -- the slim cut and wool accents made it fit right in over a suit and tie on the way to office Christmas parties. -- Billy Brown

WIRED Fantastic material choices all around. Tough waterproof outer with great stretch. Removable hood and snow skirt. Gusseted cuffs are adjustable. Plays dress-up better than Eliza Doolittle.

TIRED I've owned cheaper cars.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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From bombastic to beloved, Joachim Sauer’s trip to Wagner’s “grail”

BERLIN (Reuters) – In his youth, theoretical chemist Joachim Sauer found the music of Richard Wagner “bombastic”. All that changed when he was in his early 20s with a chance encounter with Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’.

Now the annual Wagner summer festival in Bayreuth is one of the few occasions when the media-shy Sauer is seen in public with his wife, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This year, the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth, is a special one for the many millions of “Wagnerians” who share Sauer’s passion. It was the chance to talk about Wagner’s music, and only about music, that prompted Sauer to speak to Reuters.

“If you ask me what is the best good fortune in my life of course I say that I have seen in my lifespan the Wall coming down, the reunification,” said Sauer, 63, who grew up in communist East Germany.

“But the second, which comes with it, is perhaps that I now can go to Bayreuth.”

Sauer, considered a top expert in his field for his quantum chemical work with catalysts used in the chemical industry, and also in cars, met for an interview in English over dinner recently at the restaurant of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin where he went on to see Puccini’s “Tosca”.

“They see me all the time at Bayreuth and think I only like Wagner’s music and it’s not true,” Sauer said. He also likes Beethoven, Mozart, some of the Romantic repertoire, even the music of the 20th century, and Verdi’s “La Traviata”, which he considers a masterpiece.

But what is it about Wagner’s music that Sauer, a slender, fit and cordial man whose smiling countenance throughout the dinner of fish and a glass of white wine belied his somewhat dour image in the German press, finds so engaging, if not to say addictive?

His conversion occurred by chance when he came home one day exhausted, he said.

“I was studying chemistry and this is a physically hard job because you are in the laboratory, you work hard and you come home in the late afternoon or in the evening and you always needed a break. So I would stretch out on the sofa, switch on the radio and listen to this special radio program which has a lot of classical music and I was listening to something. I didn’t know what it was but I found it very interesting.

“And at the end it turned out it was a piece of ‘Siegfried’” – from Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. “So I told myself, ‘You’re an idiot…you should listen to it.’ So this was how it started.”

“It never ends, it’s so rich,” Sauer added, speaking of the appeal of Wagner’s operas, which include the story of the “swan knight” in “Lohengrin”, the 16-hour-long “Ring” and conclude with the quest for the Holy Grail in “Parsifal”. “And they are all so very different.”

He said Bayreuth, Wagner’s purpose-built opera house on the “Green Hill” in Bavaria, is unique in allowing busy people like himself, with a fulltime career as a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, to get away from their daily routines and pay full attention to nothing but Wagner’s operas.

“Many people would be very proud if they had invented it. Therefore I am strictly against any good advice they would give to open it to change, to open it to other composers, to do all types of things. All wrong, because this is a unique thing and don’t touch it.”

AN UNEXPECTED FAVOURITE

Like many passionate Wagnerians, Sauer more or less throws up his hands when asked how many times he has seen the various operas – regularly since his 20s and at Bayreuth every year since 1990, when East and West Germany were reunited, was his rough estimate.

He said one of his greatest Wagner moments unexpectedly was a 1990s staging by the late Brecht disciple and leftist playwright Heiner Mueller of Wagner’s intensely romantic “Tristan und Isolde”, in which two unrequited lovers are united in death.

“It was really the best piece I have seen in Bayreuth so far…. I often have trouble with what is called the ‘regie theater’ where the director takes over but in this case it made sense not only in an intellectual way but also an emotional way,” Sauer said, still clearly passionate about a production that set part of the drama in a post-apocalypse world where the moribund lover Tristan, sung by Siegfried Jerusalem, wore dark sunglasses and was covered with concrete dust.

This year Bayreuth will unveil a new “Ring” by deconstructionist Berlin theatre director Frank Castorf, who has been known to dispense with whole sections of text in plays he directs, with the young Russian Kirill Petrenko conducting.

Sauer, who enjoyed the previous Bayreuth “Ring” under Wagner-immersed German conductor Christian Thielemann, is keeping an open mind. Little has been revealed about the Castorf version, apart from snippets on blogs and websites saying it will use a revolving stage and that Castorf is under orders not to make cuts.

“We take the risk. The music is still there,” Sauer said, with a wry hint of humor.

(editing by Janet McBride)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Euro Watch: Data Point to Slow Recovery in Euro Zone

The euro zone economy took a step closer to recovery this month as the rate of decline in the bloc’s private sector eased more than expected, a business survey showed on Thursday.

But in an indication of the hurdles left to scale, Spain’s unemployment surged to 26 percent in the fourth quarter, a record high since measurements began in the 1970s, as a prolonged recession and deep spending cuts left almost 6 million people out of work at the end of last year.

The manufacturing survey published by Markit supports European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s assertion that the 17-nation currency union is benefiting from “positive contagion” but still hints at an economic contraction in the first quarter of 2013.

Markit’s Flash Composite Eurozone Purchasing Managers’ Index, which surveys around 5,000 companies and is seen as a good growth indicator, jumped to 48.2 from December’s 47.2, beating expectations for a rise to 47.5.

While the index has now held below the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction in all but one of the last 17 months, Markit said the data suggested conditions in the bloc were improving.

“We shouldn’t get too gloomy about those numbers,” Chris Williamson, a data collator at Markit, said. “There is a turning point that took place towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year so things are picking up. Any downturn is looking likely to end in the first half.”

He added, however, that the manufacturing index was “still consistent” with gross domestic product in the 17-country bloc falling at a quarterly rate of about 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent.

The euro zone economy contracted in the second and third quarters of last year, meeting the technical definition of recession, and the downturn is expected to have deepened in the fourth quarter.

Earlier data from Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the bloc’s growth engine, showed its private sector expanded at its fastest pace in a year.

In neighboring France, data from Markit showed that business activity shrank in January at the fastest pace since the trough of the global financial crisis. The preliminary composite purchasing managers’ index, covering activity in the services and manufacturing sectors combined, came out at 42.7 for the month, slumping from 44.6 in December.

Spain’s unemployment rate rose to 26 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, or 5.97 million people, the National Statistics Institute said on Thursday, up from 25 percent in the previous quarter and more than double the European Union average.

“We haven’t seen the bottom yet and employment will continue falling in the first quarter,” José Luis Martínez, a strategist with Citigroup, said.

Spain sank into its second recession since 2009 at the end of 2011 after a burst housing bubble left millions of low-skilled laborers out of work and sliding private and business sentiment gutted consumer spending and imports.

Efforts by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government to control one of the euro zone’s largest deficits through billions of euros of spending cuts and tax increases have fueled general malaise, further hampering demand.

Still, Mr. Draghi of the E.C.B. is taking an optimistic view, declaring earlier this month that the euro zone economy would recover later in 2013 and that there was now a “positive contagion” effect in play.

Europe’s top central banker cited falling bond yields, rising stock markets and historically low volatility as evidence for this, causing several forecasters to ditch expectations for an imminent cut in euro zone interest rates.

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Dodgers near TV rights deal with Time Warner Cable

The Los Angeles Dodgers have negotiated a long-term television deal that would pay the team $7 billion to $8 billion, a move that would help cover its recent spending spree and quiet critics who scoffed at the record $2.15-billion purchase price paid by the new owner, Guggenheim Partners.

The expected 20-year agreement with Time Warner Cable could be announced this week, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked that their names not be used because the deal has not yet closed.

The arrangement is bad news for rival News Corp's Fox Sports unit, whose channel Prime Ticket holds cable TV rights to the Dodgers through the upcoming season. Fox will pay $39 million this season — a fraction of what Time Warner Cable would pay under the new contract — and found the proposed price tag too high, people inside News Corp. said.

And the pact would probably mean bigger pay TV bills — even for those who don't watch Dodgers baseball, potentially leading to a backlash against the team and Time Warner Cable.

Under the terms of the proposed contract, Guggenheim would own a Dodgers-dedicated television channel that would start carrying games in 2014, said the people with knowledge of the pact. Time Warner Cable would manage much of the channel's operations and handle distribution to other pay TV companies, including DirecTV and Cox Cable.

The Dodgers' move to control their own channel is driven in part by a desire to pocket as much money as possible while still abiding by Major League Baseball's revenue-sharing agreement — which requires that 34% of each team's locally generated revenue, most of it from TV rights and ticket sales, be contributed to a pool for other teams.

Mark Walter, the Dodgers' controlling owner, was believed to be sharing details of the tentative deal Tuesday with Major League Baseball officials. Walter has negotiated extensively with the league over how much of the television money must be shared with the other 29 Major League teams.

The Dodgers' revenue-sharing bill could range from $1 billion to $2.7 billion, based on the structure of the deal.

The new channel would also give the Dodgers the opportunity to expand team-related programming throughout the day, as the Los Angeles Lakers do on their Time Warner Cable channel.

"If you look at what the Lakers are doing, they're communicating with their client base," Dodgers owner and Guggenheim Partners President Todd Boehly told The Times last fall. "It's fantastic. It becomes self-fulfilling. If you start interacting with the team in all-new ways, you're going to love the team even more."

Boehly was not available for comment.

The addition of a new Dodgers network would bring the number of local sports channels in Los Angeles to six, the most in any major city in the United States. Besides Time Warner Cable's SportsNet and Deportes, and Fox's Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, the Pac-12 Conference also has its own channel here. Fox Sports West carries Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Angels games.

"That's too many channels," said Marc Ganis, a sports industry consultant in Chicago. "I can't imagine that is sustainable on a long-term basis."

Sports channels aren't cheap. Time Warner Cable already charges other cable and satellite operators close to $4 a month a subscriber for SportsNet. The Dodgers and Time Warner Cable are expected to seek as much as $5 for their new channel, which is double what Fox charges for Prime Ticket, according to industry consulting firm SNL Kagan.

Those price hikes are generally passed on to consumers, who may resent the increase.

"Why do I have to pay for the Dodgers when I am not a Dodgers fan?" said Laura Burnes, a mother of two who lives in Orange County. "I don't want to see my cable costs go up any more."

The cost for sports has skyrocketed over the last decade. That's partly because the content is seen as "DVR proof." It is watched live by viewers, which makes it more valuable to advertisers and networks than sitcoms and dramas, which are often recorded and viewed later by people who skip ads.

But non-sports fans and pay TV companies are increasingly frustrated at having to pick up the tab for big sports deals. There have been calls to sell sports channels "a la carte," or separately from other programming.

The Dodger agreement with Time Warner Cable may be a tipping point.

"That is the solution everyone should be looking at seriously," said Derek Chang, a former senior executive at satellite broadcaster DirecTV. Such a move, he added, may be the only way to lower the cost of TV sports. "Ultimately the market for fees would then reset."

The Dodger deal marks the second time in less than two years that Time Warner Cable has outbid Fox Sports for a Los Angeles franchise. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $3.6 billion for a 20-year accord with the Lakers, which had been on Fox Sports West.

Time Warner Cable used the Lakers to create SportsNet and Deportes, a Spanish-language sports channel.

The two media titans have also done battle on other turf.

Last year, Fox acquired an ownership stake in Yes, the New York sports channel that is home to the Yankees. In 2011, Fox outbid Time Warner Cable for rights to the San Diego Padres.

Losing the Dodgers will hurt Fox's Prime Ticket, but the company still has rights to the Los Angeles Clippers and Anaheim Ducks. A Fox executive said there are no plans to consolidate Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, which besides the Angels also has rights to the Stanley Cup champion Kings.

Distributors will press for a reduction in the fee for Prime Ticket without the Dodgers, but it's not a sure thing they'll get it, Ganis said. When New York's MSG channel lost rights to the Yankees, the subscription fee did not decrease.

joe.flint@latimes.com

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

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Falling Photos Force Us to Face Our Fundamental Fears

Kerry Skarbakka wants to capture the feeling you get when you’re about to eat it — wrecking your bike, tripping down the stairs, falling off a ladder — and you know it. The ground comes flying up and for a split second you’re resigned to letting events take their course. To do that, he voluntarily throws himself off of things and takes a photo in midair.

He sets up these falling photos by scoping a location he likes and then figuring out what he needs to stay safe during the plunge. If he can get away without using ropes, great, but if he needs to, Skarbakka will wear a harness underneath his clothing and tie off to an anchor. He tries to keep the falls shorter than seven feet. His girlfriend usually snaps the photos, but he says he’s also occasionally resorted to asking random people on the street to push the button.

“I ask [people], ‘Can you press the shutter when I look most compromised?’ which often gets a weird reaction,” says Skarbakka, an assistant professor of digital media and photographic studies at Prescott College in Arizona.

When Skarbakka frames the shot, he likes to try and hide the rope from view. If the rope somehow makes it into the frame, he’ll Photoshop it out in post production. He then makes enormous prints of the photos — almost life size — which helps transport the viewer to the scene of the “accident.”

Predictably, there have been some mishaps during the picture-taking process. The worst injury he’s sustained is a broken rib, but he says there’s been innumerable bumps and bruises. Sometimes the location is so intense he won’t even try to fall. In the railroad bridge photo, for example, he leaned over the edge (while tied to one of the railroad tracks) just far enough to be at what looked like a point of no return. But he never actually jumped off.

He says most of the reaction to the work has been positive but occasionally misunderstood. In 2005 he worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on a performance piece where he was photographed as a special effects team dropped him off the museum’s roof dozens of times. A member of the media covering the event made a visual connection between the art and the people jumping out of the World Trade Center during 9/11 and quickly initiated a wave of backlash against Skarbakka, who says a comparison was never his intention.

“People got really mad,” he says.

At the moment Skarbakka says he’s trying to cull all the work together into a book and is actively looking for a publisher. In the future he’ll be incorporating the desert into his work — which is new to him because he recently moved to Arizona. He says he’s curious to know how we might change as a society if we were a little more resolved to the fact that a bit of chaos is inevitable.

“If we can give up that control, worry a little less about that existential anxiety, what would that do for us?” he says.

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Vegan pizza, smoked salmon Oscars on offer at post-Oscars ball

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hollywood’s elite will chow down on vegan pizza and kale salad in addition to the traditional smoked salmon Oscars at the annual Governor’s Ball after next month’s Academy Awards ceremony, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck announced on Tuesday.

Unveiling his menu for the year’s biggest movie party, Puck said chicken pot pie with shaved black truffles, mini Kobe burgers, Japanese baby peach salad, steamed red snapper with Thai spice, Tuna Nicoise and his signature gold-dusted mini-chocolate Oscars also would be served.

Some 1,500 guests are expected at the ball immediately after the February 24 Oscars ceremony, including nominees such as George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain.

Puck’s menu could be the first chance for many of the attendees to eat since breakfast, as nominees and presenters stave off food in order to squeeze in to fitted gowns and tuxedos for the televised red carpet arrivals and ceremony.

“Nobody eats lunch that day, so by nine o’clock, anybody who would be on a diet is no longer on that diet,” Puck said.

With Oscar-nominated films ranging from dramas to comedies and musicals, guests at the ball – the Academy’s official celebration – will be dining on dishes just as varied.

“We have so many great nominated movies from ‘Argo’ to ‘Les Miserables’ to ‘Silver Linings Playbook,” Puck told Reuters. “It’s a really great year for movies with lots of variety, so we are going to serve a variety of dishes.”

Puck, who this year is marking his 19th year catering the ball, and chef Matt Bencivenga will serve over 50 dishes from hors d’ oeuvres and entrees that will be served on small plates throughout the evening.

Gastronomical items will include Chinese, French, Italian dishes and others from Puck’s many Los Angeles eateries.

The master chef told Reuters there will also be a strong focus this year on vegan dishes, including pizza, kale salad with grilled artichoke, and a beet salad with spiced walnut among others.

“If they don’t find something to eat (among our dishes) then they are really finicky,” joked Puck.

About 300 of Puck’s staff will be in the kitchen and 650 on the dining room floor, which will be laid out with small tables and booths to create a party atmosphere rather than a black tie dinner, according to Puck.

Completing the setting will be a 120-foot (37-meter)chandelier hanging from the ceiling and an 18-foot (5.5-meter) golden Oscar as the centerpiece of the ballroom floor.

Puck said food preparation will start a few days before the event with the making of dishes like smoked salmon and tortellini, but “we cook everything as if we were cooking for an intimate party of 25 – everything at the last moment.”

By midnight, Puck said the festivities would be pretty much over as attendees moved to other parties. That’s when he’ll get his first opportunity of the day to relax “and hang with a few people I know, and we sit around and have some good wine.”

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Paul Simao)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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