Archives .:...

May 29th, 2008

:: :::::: From 'VSD' :::::: ::



[Thanks Mymy]

:: Céline in Paris shopping on Champs-Elysées and Rue de Rivoli - May 28 - ::



[Source: PurePeople]

May 27th, 2008

:: Celine in Paris - May 26th - Versace Store ::



[Source: PurePeople]

:: Tickets for Céline Dion & Co. on the Plains ::

(6:50 a.m. GMT) The distribution of tickets for the August 22 show Céline Dion & Co. on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City has begun, and will continue until August 15 across Québec so that as many people as possible have a chance to get a pair of tickets. Click here to get information on the distribution of tickets.

May 25th, 2008

:: High-Quality Pics ::



[Source: Just Jared]

:: The New Costume for the Finale - MHWGO + PQTME ::



[Source: Flickr]

May 23rd, 2008

:: Celine & Rene @ Grevin Museum ::



[Source: AP; AFP]

May 22st, 2008

:: Céline Dion, Knight of France !! ::



(8:00 p.m. GMT) By clicking here, you will be able to watch a report about the ceremony of the Legion of Honour. The report about Celine is at 32.16 minute. --- President Nicolas Sarkozy presented Celine Dion with the Legion of Honor, on Thursday during a ceremony at the Elysee in the presence of her family.

The artist, visibly very moved, was wearing a black lace dress topped by a curved jacket in black satin. She was accompanied by her husband and agent Rene Angelil, her son Rene-Charles, her mother Therese Tanguay, in a long green robe as well as her thirteen brothers and sisters, some accompanied by their own family. Paying tribute to the "international star", currently on tour in France, president Sarkozy wished to "thank" Celine Dion "for spreading the French language beyond their borders. "We must understand that if we are so committed" to the French language, "we are not opposed to English," said Sarkozy, for whom the world is more pleasant with several languages "because diversity is a treasure. "

[Source: Yahoo!, Mister-Info; Abacausa; Cyberpresse]

:: Legion of Honour ::

(7:00 a.m. GMT) President Nicolas Sarkozy will present Canada's Celine Dion today at 6:00 p.m. CET with the Legion of Honour, a medal created by Napoleon in 1802 to honour France's civilian and military heroes, a French government source confirmed Friday. Dion was originally granted the medal in 2005 but was unable to appear because of her commitment to perform in Las Vegas. The presentation, to be made while Dion is in Paris on a concert tour, comes six days before a wax statue of her husband, Rene Angelil, will be unveiled at the Grevin Museum in Paris.

[Source: Canadian Press]

May 16th, 2008

:: Celine Dion @ « 50mn Inside » ::

(6:00 a.m. GMT) Sandrine Quétier and Nikos Aliagas will present a new episode of the French entertainment show « 50mn Inside » on Saturday, May 17th at 6:50 p.m. CET on TF1. Celine Dion will be featured in one of the reports presented.

[Source: coulisses-tv]

May 15th, 2008

:: Celine Dion Performing in Antwerp - May 14th ::



[Thanks Hans]

:: Celine Dion in Antwerpen - May 13th ::



[Source: 7s7]

May 14th, 2008

:: :::::: From the 'Het Laatste Nieuws' :::::: ::

:: :::::: From the 'Gazet Van Antwerpen Metropool' :::::: ::

:: First Concert in Antwerpen (Belgium) - Song-list ::

• I Drove All Night

• The Power of love

• J'irais Ou Tu Iras

• Taking Chances

• Destin

• Et s'il n'en restait qu'une

• Ziggy

• Tous l'or Des hommes

• Eyes On Me

• S'il Suffisait D'aimer

• Dans Un Autre Monde

• All by Myself

• I'm Alive

• My Love

• We Will Rock You

• The Show Must Go On

• Medley Soul

• It's a Man's World

• On ne Change Pas

• Alone

• Love Can Move Mountains

• River Deep, Mountain High

• My Heart Will Go On

• Pour Que Tu M'aimes Encore

May 13th, 2008

:: Céline Dion @ "This Morning" ::

:: Celine Dion & RC leaving their London Hotel (U.K.) - May 11th ::



[Source: PurePeople]

May 12th, 2008

:: Celine Dion Performing in Birmingham (U.K.) - May 10th ::



[Source: Abacausa]

May 11th, 2008

:: Celine Live in Birmingham (May 10th) ::

May 10th, 2008

:: ::::: From "Ciné Télé Revue" ::::: ::



[Thanks Solange]

:: Footages + Interview from London Concerts ::

May 9th, 2008

:: Celine Dion @ Access Hollywood - Videos ::

(6:30 a.m. GMT) US popular entertainment news show Access Hollywood recently interviewed Celine Dion in Manchester, UK. They showed this interview last night. By clicking here, you will be able to watch Celine talking about life after her run in Las Vegas, raising her son on the road and what she has planned next. And by clicking here, you will be able to take a look to an exclusive backstage pass.

May 7th, 2008

** Updating **
:: Celine Dion arrives back at her hotel in London (U.K.) - May 6th ::



[Source: JustJared, BelgaPictures]

:: Concert Review: A night with a talented diva - May 6th ::

(11:20 a.m. GMT) Some divas are born. Others, you suspect, have divadom thrust upon them. Despite selling almost 200 million albums, Celine Dion is probably in the latter camp. In her first London show since 1999, the 40-year-old worked too hard, sweated too much and spent too long on stage to be a genuine diva. And while she did announce that her son Rene-Charles and her mother Therese had joined her in the capital, she had the grace not to parade them to the crowd.

Christened the Taking Chances tour, perhaps in irony, this gaudy, loose-limbed spectacular took very few chances. There were costume changes: five in all (the flared trousers were shockingly unflattering; the gigantic white cape endearingly bonkers and the rest oddly alluring). There were eight wonderfully choreographed dancers, lighting that could illuminate Neptune and, as if we had chanced upon the set of a misguided Seventies peek into the future, moving walkways.

Those peripherals made the evening, but the show itself was about Dion’s voice. Edith Piaf offered the same conundrum 60 years ago, but it seemed almost a miracle of nature that someone so tiny of waist could produce vocals of such extraordinary power. Yet whether wrapping itself around James Brown’s It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World, rescuing The Power Of Love from karaoke hell or somehow breathing life into River Deep Mountain High, that voice reinvented whatever it touched. And so poised and believable was her assault on the closing My Heart Will Go On (alas nobody in the crowd remembered to do the Titanic pose), that for a moment you almost forgot what a ghastly slab of hammy old schlock it is.

Indeed, while she remains overly addicted to jobbing American songwriting hacks such as Dianne Warren and Linda Perry for her material, when she unfurled a great song everything made sense. On the genius Jim Steinman’s It’s All Coming Back To Me Now or that painfully unflinching dissection of a decaying long-term relationship, Think Twice, the drama and too-often suppressed darkness of Dion’s voice made for an almost perfect entwining of singer and song.

As if to confirm that she will never be credible, an ill-conceived medley of Queen’s We Will Rock You and The Show Must Go On was unspeakably naff, but frankly who cares? Certainly not Celine Dion, the anti-diva diva. Celine Dion also plays the O2 Arena in London tomorrow .

[Source: Thisislondon]

:: Celine Performing in London (U.K.) - May 6th ::



[Source: JustJared; WireImage]

May 5th, 2008

:: Concert Review: Céline Dion at Manchester MEN Arena ::

(11:20 a.m. GMT) Few performers illustrate the gulf between music critics and record buyers quite as starkly as Céline Dion. Playing her first British dates in almost a decade over the weekend, the French-Canadian filled Manchester's largest indoor concert venue for two nights running. Despite routinely attracting media scorn for her sappy songs and mumsy dress sense, the 40-year-old singer has sold 200 million albums in just over two decades, culminating in a five-year Las Vegas residency.

She challenged a few preconceptions in Manchester, mine included. Opening with the rousing disco-rock crescendo of Roy Orbison's I Drove All Night, she burst on to an elaborate in-the-round stage loaded with trap doors, moving walkways and revolving video screens. Thronged by dancers and a small army of musicians, she struck a proud, statuesque, drag-queen pose. This kind of sense-blitzing excitement rarely lasts long, but Dion delivered two hours of mostly engaging, revved-up spectacle. This was partly due to her busy, bustling, hi-tech stage presentation, which allowed no room for irony or boredom to take hold. But her famously supple voice was a factor too, remaining strong and fluid as she rocketed through the octaves.

There was also an endearing quality to her beatific, unassuming demeanour that excused even her more toe-curling attempts at currying audience favour, including a comically bizarre aside about Manchester United's imminent Moscow fixture. Almost 20 years to the day since winning the Eurovision Song Contest, representing Switzerland, she still retains some of that lost-in-translation innocence. Modelling a succession of diva-ish outfits, each more glamorously impractical than the last, Dion was undeniably camp in Manchester, but never kitsch. There was no hint of snickering, guiltily pleasurable irony when she belted out hen-night karaoke classics such as Heart's Alone and Jennifer Rush's The Power of Love. Both gave big-haired 1980s power ballads a good name.

Even better was her magisterial reading of Eric Carmen's much covered heartbreak anthem, All By Myself, which Dion transformed into a towering Taj Mahal of self-pity. During My Love, another blustery weepie from her latest album, Taking Chances, she even choked back tears in a crowd-pleasing display worthy of Hillary Clinton - to whom, bizarrely, the singer is distantly related.

A handful of nondescript plodders tainted this show, including a graceless medley of Queen and James Brown covers. But, overall, there were more highlights than lulls. The inevitable encore of My Heart Will Go On, Dion's mega-smash theme to Titanic, was performed atop a lofty podium surrounded by flickering candles. Cheesy, but fabulous. You don't get this sort of gloriously overblown Hollywood finale from the Kaiser Chiefs.

However bland her relentlessly middle-of-the-road records may be, Dion has clearly learnt a few tricks about razzle-dazzle from Vegas. Unexpectedly, I find myself a Céline Dion fan. I hereby tender my resignation as a music critic.

[Source: TimesOnline - written by Stephen Dalton]

:: "Eyes on Me" Music Video ::

By clicking here, you will be able to watch the official music video of Eyes on Me. The footages have been taken from the Taking Chances World Tour in South-Africa, Dubai and Asia.

:: Celine Dion: coltish Celine opens her heart ::

(6:30 a.m. GMT) It is just over 20 years to the day since Québec-born Celine Dion won the Eurovision song contest - oddly, representing Switzerland. Since then she has sold nearly 200 million records, duetted with everyone from Frank Sinatra to R-Kelly and captured a global audience. She's the musical inspiration behind the X Factor oeuvre and has just completed a record five-year, five-nights-a-week residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Of all the "VH1 divas" of the 1990s, Dion is the most loved and loathed.

Yet outside of her career-defining hit from the film Titanic, My Heart Will Go On, the majority of non-Celine Dion fans would be hard pressed to name a song by her. It as if there are two planets, one on which Dion is revered as a deity who has the voice of an angel, and the other on which she is scornfully perceived as the cheesy, clenched woman who wails like a foghorn. Manchester may have felt cheated when it lost out on the super-casino, but for her first UK tour in nearly a decade, planet Dion brought to the city a bizarre yet intoxicating mix of Vegas showmanship and Euro-schmaltz.

The high-tech stage was placed up close in the round and Dion bounded in to greet the roaring audience in a strapless pink mini-dress and silver high heels, belting out a high-energy update of Cyndi Lauper's I Drove All Night. Physically, she is all angles and bones, coltish in the same way as Sarah Jessica Parker - and not, as a journalist once observed, in the manner of a Brazilian transvestite. It looks as though Nancy Dell'Olio is styling her, but Dion's fashion tics (the backwards tuxedo at the 1999 Oscars being the pinnacle) have been ironed out along with the hair, and her umpteen costumes were impressively accessorised by vertiginous spiked heels.

All the things that wind people up about Dion were very much present, but somehow in the context of an arena full of adoring middle-aged couples, mothers and daughters and gay men, they seemed endearingly camp and entertaining. She doesn't dance so much as wildly point while scrunching her face in an expression somewhere between anguish and anger. Her phrasing is odd and she has only two volume controls: trembling melodrama and nuclear bombast.

Yet her connection with her audience is intense and she kept running out on extended platforms, as if she couldn't get close enough to them. For every tearful ballad, the best of which was Think Twice, there was some up-tempo number, such as a tribute to Freddie Mercury, and one to James Brown and Tina Turner. For the finale, My Heart Will Go On, the arena was bathed in candlelight, but with all the sentimentality there was an admirable lack of ego in Dion's desire to please her audience more than silence her critics.

[Source: telegraph.co.uk]

May 4th, 2008

:: Celine Dion To Be Knighted On May 22nd ::

(10:00 a.m. GMT) According to the French newspaper "Aujourd'hui en France", Celine Dion will be knighted by the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, on May 22nd, 2008 in Paris.

** Updating **
:: Videos From Last Night's Concert in Manchester ::

May 3rd, 2008

:: Concert Review: Celine Dion @ M.E.N. Arena ::

(12:00 p.m. GMT) WHOEVER said "less is more" reckoned without Celine Dion. For her, more is never quite enough.There is always another crashing chorus or cataclysmic change. As two 20,000-strong crowds at the MEN Arena discovered, she can do a Jim Steinman song more beefily than Meat Long and a Queen song more histrionically than the late Freddie Mercury. Celine does not so much sell a song as ram it down your throat and staple the bill to your forehead.

All of which has helped her shift over 200m albums and made the 40-year-old Canadian the biggest-seling female artist in the world. It's been almost ten years since Dion ventured out into the wider world. Half of that time was given over to motherhood and the other half to a 600-show residency in Las Vegas which made even Elvis seem like a slouch. She arrives back in the UK with her titanic pipes in fine fettle and with an in-the-round show whose non-stop visuals and choreography has the high-gloss meaninglessness of Cirque du Soleil.

Big-lunged

It's easy to criticise her as hammy and overwrought. You could say much the same of great dramatic divas like Barbara Streisand and Liza Minelli. But there are many moments when even the sceptic is wowed by the voice which, for big-lunged power and control, has no present-day peer, with the possible exception of Christina Aguilera. There was some so-so new material to wade through. Eyes on Me is like one of Shakira's leftovers. Taking Chances is a by-the-numbers big ballad.

But Dion's reading of Steinman's It's All Coming Back To Me Now was a towering pile of kitsch with a glace cherry on top. All By Myself was one part Eric Carmen, one part Rachmaninov and three-parts schamltz, but delicious with it. When the band stopped and Dion emoted her way to the high-risk key change, it was less a feat of singing and more like an Evel Knievel stunt.

Finale

Think Twice remains a turbo-charged power ballad, and the Titanic theme My Heart Will Go On - which should by rights now induce global seasickness - was an impressively staged finale with Dion raised up on a plinth surrounded by candles. Queen's The Show Must Go On might have been made for Dion, though her version of James Brown''s It's a Man's Man's Man's World was about as odd a choice as Tom Jones singing Stand By Your Man.

Celine is a curious figure. Stick-thin, it seems as if all the nourishment goes to sustaining that monster voice. Her strange range of facial expressions mean that songs conclude either with a Peter Beardsley-like gurn or a looked of pained weariness which says "I've given my all". But like her or loathe her, there is no denying that Celine Dion is one of a kind.

[Source: manchestereveningnews]

:: Celine Performing in Manchester (U.K.) - May 2nd ::







[Source: Abacausa, PurePeople; Flickr]

:: VOTE FOR CELINE!! ::

(6:00 a.m. GMT) On Billboad Magazine website they are running a poll about "Which tour or festival do you think will be the best show of the summer?"...RUSH AND VOTE NOW FOR CELINE.

May 2nd, 2008

:: Celine Leaving her Hotel in Manchester (U.K.) - May 2nd ::



[Source: BelgaPicture]

:: Is Celine Dion returning to Las Vegas? ::

(630 a.m. GMT) Yesterday, Robin Leach broke on his blog a story that negotiations have begun to bring Celine Dion back to Caesars Palace to headline again starting at the end of 2009 or early 2010. Los Angeles Times reached AEG Live (which books the venue for Caesars) to get confirmation that it was in negotiations to return a Celine Dion show to Vegas.

The official statement released to it: "Right now Celine's focus is on her worldwide tour. We (AEG Live) begin the North American tour in August. We love Celine and always keep the door open for her to return to Las Vegas if she wishes." That, of course, implies AEG Live is somehow too busy and Celine too focused with the immediate future to worry about the long-term future, which, of course, is nonsense. And also significant is that this does not answer whether AEG Live is negotiating with Dion's people to return the show to Vegas?

At least AEG Live is clear that the ball is in Dion's court about a return engagement. Of course, that has always been the case. Celine Dion was almost unique among Strip shows in that she closed "A New Day" while still able to sell out every performance. So despite having time to send out a few score words of obfuscation (on what Celine is focused on, how much AEG loves Celine, when her North American tour starts, etc.), when it comes to trying to get a direct "yes" or "no" answer to the question of whether AEG and Dion are negotiating for a return to Vegas, it's: "The AEG spokespeople are unavailable to talk to you."

[Source: Los Angeles Times]

May 1st, 2008

:: Celine Leaving her Hotel in Manchester (U.K.) - April 30th ::



[Source: BelgaPicture]