Is anyone else disappointed that the dystopian future promised in 1980s films isn’t here? If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Torontoist, is that en masse, humans are terrible at predicting our future. It’s always so much more mundane than we expect it to be. The perfect example being The Running Man. Instead of audiences being unsatisfied unless they’re watching the most ridiculously violent reality TV shows possible, here people are absolutely satisfied......

Every day this week, Torontoist is exploring the future of repertory cinema in Toronto. We spoke to the theatre managers of four major rep cinemas to hear if rep cinema is dying, what it's like to exist in a YouTube society, and what original programming has them most excited. Today, to conclude our series, we look at the next immediate steps for rep cinema. Photo by Flashfonic. The story of rep cinema in Toronto is......

Every day this week, Torontoist is exploring the future of repertory cinema in Toronto. We spoke to the theatre managers of four major rep cinemas to hear if rep cinema is dying, what it's like to exist in a YouTube society, and what original programming has them most excited. Today, we look at the renovated Fox Theatre and its battle! against! the! killer! dvds! Photos by Jonathan Goldsbie. When Festival Cinemas flopped in 2006, the......

Every day this week, Torontoist is exploring the future of repertory cinema in Toronto. We spoke to the theatre managers of four major rep cinemas to hear if rep cinema is dying, what it's like to exist in a YouTube society, and what original programming has them most excited. Today, we look at the fall of Festival Cinemas, which sparked fears that rep cinema would disappear from the city. In 2006, the future of repertory......

The men's washrooms at the Fox Theatre, after a kickass screening of The Terminator. A nerdy guy in his late thirties is trying to strike up a conversation with the middle-aged man using the urinal next to his. Nerdy Guy: You know that part when the human comes in? Middle-Aged Man: Which human? Nerdy Guy: The guy, Kyle Reese. A stuntman had to fall six metres onto the concrete. Middle-Aged Man: (wondering where this......

There is a moment near the end of the first act of Maureen Hunter's play Wild Mouth when Oliver Becker, playing the tortured Ukrainian WWI vet Bohdan, grabs Sarah Orenstein as proto-feminist anti-war Englishwoman Anna (pictured, left), douses her in pig's blood, and then rubs the animal's heart all over her face and body. It's a shocking and highly provocative moment, and seems to foreshadow a very dark second act. But that's not quite......

Hello readers! If you were lucky enough to win tickets to the screening of There Will Be Blood last night you will have already made your mind up about the film (well, we hope), but we’re going to subject you to our opinion of it anyway. Quite good, wasn’t it? Contrary to a lot of things we’ve heard, it did seem to be identifiably a Paul Thomas Anderson film (strong performances, non-traditional story arc,......

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. When the Festival Cinemas chain was shut down last year by supervillains The McQuillain Kids (after inheriting the business......

Feeling “Christmassy” yet? We aren’t either (we've just assumed you weren’t, apologies if you are, or something), and there isn’t that much on at the cinema yet to start ramping up the festive joy. It’s a Wonderful Life is showing at the Fox starting tomorrow and Bad Santa is going to be on at the Revue this Wednesday. To be completely honest, if you’re going to check out anything at those cinemas, we recommend......

It might be time to cut back on the brews. Fox News is reporting that old beer fridges, which one in three Canadians keep in their houses, are remarkably inefficient and "contribute significantly" to global warming. The report was commissioned by the federal government, which says something about how much the government cares about your beer-related habits. Denise Young, the researcher who put together the study, suggests that the government provide financial incentives and......

We don’t think we’ve ever lead with the same film two weeks in a row, but there’s a first time for everything. Did you get a chance to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut this week? We did. It was amazing. We really can’t think of a film we’d rather lead with (and there’s some good stuff this week). If you didn’t get a chance to see it, consider yourself massively lucky, because it’s still......

A Good Idea (In Theory) is a new play currently running at Passe Muraille that, as its title implies, is trying to do things a little differently. For starters, in lieu of a program, audience members are given a soundtrack CD. As the play's website explains, the idea behind the project came from the question: "What would happen if an award-winning stage play by a young Canadian was supported by a group of independent......

During TIFF we said, "if you’re as big a fan of Joy Division as Torontoist is, you’ll quickly come to terms with the fact that Control is simply one man’s interpretation of Deborah Curtis’s book Touching from a Distance, and your overall feelings will (probably) lie on how you feel about that interpretation," and we stand by that even now—despite the gorgeous cinematography, which remains the film’s strongest point, we still like 24 Hour......

Slightly different beginning to our Film Friday today, because we’d like to highlight the fact that our favourite film in ages, Reprise (pictured above), was released on DVD this week. We really feel it should have been given the same kind of cinematic release it’s getting right now in the UK, rather than an astonishingly bare-bones DVD transfer with burned-in subtitles, but what are you going to do? You really have to see it......

The Revue cinema is due to reopen its doors on October 4th, and if you’ve been waiting for the chance to buy tickets for the opening night, they’re now on sale at She Said Boom (393 Roncesvalles Avenue) at $20 for the film and the after-party or $10 for just the party at the Lithuanian Hall (1573 Bloor Street West). The opening night film is secret, but it was selected by an online poll,......

Been looking for a way to gain fame and fortune by exploiting your kid's intelligence? Here's your chance: this Friday is the Toronto casting call for kids to be on Are You Smarter Than a Canadian 5th Grader, the Canadian version of Fox's Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader (in case you couldn't tell). Registration begins at 8:00 a.m. at The Fairmont Royal York at 100 Front Street West. You can download the application......

Canadian music fans might have heard of Sherrie Lea Laird. She covered Sade's "No Ordinary Love." She has a band, Pandemonia, and they just released a classic rock CD called Left to Die...In the Wide Open. Oh, yeah—and she married Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, had an affair with JFK, and starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Laird is the subject of a book by a Dr. Adrian Finkelstein, "Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a......

So apparently there's this film coming out tomorrow about some family called "The Sampsons" or "The Simpsons" or something. You probably haven't heard much about it, as the company producing the film (they're named after an animal, it's like WOLF or FOX) doesn't have very much money for promotion, certainly not enough to renovate entire convenience stores across the United States to look like convenience stores in the film or to renovate a downtown......

When a dozen U.S. 7-11s were converted into Kwik-e-Marts earlier this month, Torontoist wondered when we were going to get our share of The Simpsons' Movie hype. First, savvy ad execs painted a giant donut around the base of the CN Tower. Now, the Fox and Fiddle (106 John Street) is being turned into Moe's Tavern for a Thursday night post-screening party. Rumour has it that Flaming Moes will be served. Rumour also has......

Enjoy showering with toy animals going at it inside your soap? Collect silver vinyl vegan handbags? Is cross stitching pin-up girls your thing? Then you have to check out the Sassy Little Craft Show at the Victory Café on Friday June 22, 7 p.m.–12:30 a.m. The show’s MySpace proclaims "This aint [sic] your granny's church basement!" And this craft party sure doesn't seem so. Grab a drink and browse the kitsch, the tack, and the......

Did you know that 26% of Ontarians believe in creationism? 42% of Canadians think dinosaurs and humans coexisted on earth. Check out these fun stats from a recent Angus Reid poll. Dalton McGuinty is launching a $650 million fund which will offer grants to Ontario automotive companies that build clean energy power generators. The goal? More electric, solar-powered, and wind-powered cars. The ideal? Emission-free vehicles that run on the feces of handbag dogs. T.O.......

Thousands of crane and heavy equipment operators go on strike. So if you needed to lift something really heavy, well, you should have done that last week. Jordin Sparks wins American Idol. Now she will go on to have a career as brilliantly successful as Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, and that crazy dude with the prematurely white hair from last season who rips off Joe Cocker's shtick. And in ten months' time, Fox will......

Would you want to read a book about the middle-aged agoraphobe son of a dead rock star whose life is transformed by a nine year old girl who wants to be a dog? Tish Cohen thinks you will, and Torontoist agrees. The Toronto native has just published her first novel, Town House, which she describes as an “urban anxiety tale”. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, not only in the musty halls of......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

Think of all the things you can do with panties...you can freeze the panties of the first to pass out at a sleepover. You can strip down to them and have a slap and tickle fight. And tonight, you can round up your quality, new, unused panties and donate them to a great cause. Tonight, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. is PANTY SCHMOOZE 2007 at the Fox & Fiddle (190 Laird Drive)! Hosted by Jully Black......

It was curtains in Orange County last night as FOX’s golden child threw its final punch. After four years in The O.C., creator Josh Schwartz has taught us that money can’t buy happiness, but it sure does buy a Range Rover full of jaw-dropping plot twists. At a time when television was dominated by Who Wants to Survive My Geek Super Nanny and other such reality gems, those lovable but not infallible kids from Newport......

In the fall of 1979, 21-year-old Terry Fox, recovering from a recent lower-leg amputation, devised a plan to help support the thousands of Canadians who, like him, had faced off with cancer. He would run across Canada, beginning in St. John's, Newfoundland, and wrapping up on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Figuring the journey would take roughly five months, Fox hoped to raise $1 for every Canadian man, woman and child. The Canadian......

North Korea agrees to shut down its main nuclear reactor and "eventually" shut down its nuclear weapons program. In exchange for a million tons of fuel oil, of course, but frankly nobody so far has come up with a better plan regarding North Korea than "keep bribing them to do nothing," so it boils down to a no-score win. Opposition parties charge that the Tories are stacking judgeship selection committees with conservative partisans to drive......

Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging on Friday, and video of the execution popped up on the internet by Sunday. The CBC link doesn't have the video, because they're a news organization, and as such not in the business of providing snuff films. If you want to see it, go to Fox or CNN, who both have it. No, no links. Torontoist is likewise not in the business of providing snuff films. Canada's chief of......

The big news this week involves a beloved elder statesman of cinema, whose name begins with R, that is finally reappearing after a heartbreaking absence and an uncertain future. We talk, of course, about the return of, yes… Rocky Balboa! Who can’t wait, huh? Rocky! In what is essentially Rocky VI! He’s going to like, slur incoherently, punch big bits of meat, look confused, and probably get a total doing off his opponent! Opens this......