Two men who went on a Hollywood-worthy crime spree Saturday night and Sunday morning are being sought in a carjacking, shooting, three robberies, and a high-speed police chase. Descriptions of the suspects have now been released—if this is you, please turn yourself in. What do you give the province that has everything? That's what Alberta politicians will be asking themselves, with a provincial election expected to be called there this week. Likely winners are......

Hey, did you know it's snowing? School buses have already been cancelled for today, meaning that children will romp and play in the streets and sabotage snowplow drivers and Chevy Chase will duel with a rival meteorologist for some reason and the mayor will declare it to be the "funnest day ever." Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have a nice, pleasant debate about minute policy issues. The debate was thus about as interesting as watching......

Miss the fourth installation of YO! Remember the 90's?? As if! Unless you're totally clueless when it comes to comebacks, you know the nineties are the dopest thing since, like, the eighties. And if you don't, you oughta know. No, we're not talking overplayed nu-rave, just good old-fashioned dance mixes: hip-hop, pop and rock, plus all the one-hit wonders it's cool to like now that there's a decade of ironic distance between you and your......

Waves eroding the tip of the Toronto Islands. A project to keep it from eroding will cost around $14 million, thus reminding us all once again that attempting to combat the effects of Mother Nature is a horribly costly experience, as anybody who has ever bought a jar of Oil of Olay knows full well. Golden Globes without writers turn out to be massively boring. Number of people surprised by this: zero. In revenge......

Sarah Polley is having a kickass month as her debut directorial feature, Away From Her, racks up the accolades. On Sunday, the Los Angeles film critics gave Polley a New Generation Award for up-and-coming directors. Then, on Monday, the New York film critics felt Away From Her was 2007's Best First Film. In addition, earlier this month Polley was named one of the "50 Smartest People in Hollywood" by Entertainment Weekly. She's the youngest......

When you think of literacy, chances are the first name that comes to mind isn't Slash. But the notoriously bad-assed guitarist from rock legends Guns n' Roses has recently come out with an autobiography detailing his many, many encounters with sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. He was born in England but moved to LA in the early seventies, where he was surrounded by musical icons such as Joni Mitchell and David Geffen, and even......

These days, everyone and their grandmother has a celebrity gossip blog. Perez Hilton became a millionaire by outing Lance Bass and defacing paparazzi photos, while TMZ.com (named for the Thirty Mile Zone surrounding Hollywood) came out of nowhere in 2005 and almost instantaneously became the top site to see celebrities behaving badly. Sassafraz may be the closest we have to The Ivy, yet it's not stocked with a phalanx of paps, and celebrities can usually......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday. Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of......

For decades, Toronto has been one of Hollywood's most versatile back lots. Along the way, every specialized branch of the multi-headed film and television biz has sprouted up in the city. Camera, electrical, post production, locations and ... plane crash and natural disaster recreations? Yep, TV series like Discovery Channel's Mayday recreate the drama and the horror of famous plane crashes. Art director Adrian Greenlaw and his crew of disaster dressing specialists range across......

So, things are rapidly going to hell in Pakistan. Somewhere between one and two thousand people have been "detained" (i.e., dragged away) since Saturday and all private television stations shut down and the country is about ninety percent of the way to pure chaos, which, given that they have nuclear weapons, is bad. Of course, the White House managed to find the good in the situation, namely that Iraq could be as bad as Pakistan.......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday. Londonist got the big scoop of the week with what may be the first images of notorious street artist Banksy in action. They also got on a runaway train without......

In this new column we'll be taking a look at Toronto's illustrious film history, during which our fair city has represented just about everywhere on earth. Yes, we're proud of our chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow. Heck, Toronto even plays itself, every now and then. It all begins with two amazing phenomena that coincided in the 1980s: The rise of Toronto as a Hollywood player, and the career......

Earlier this week, Toronto's film production industry introduced the Green-Screen alliance, which has the goal of increasing the eco-consciousness of productions shooting in and around the city. At a time when more and more producers, directors and actors are supporting environmental charities yet not applying their tax-deductible beliefs to their own industry, Green-Screen is taking a welcome step inside. A voluntary initiative that will help film shoots to reduce their carbon footprint at all......

The price of oil scaled new heights yesterday, climbing up over $80 US for the first time ever. That's good news if you're an oil company, but bad news if you're a regular folk who likes to go places, or do things, or eat stuff. McDonald's Canada is going upscale. Influenced by popular chains such as Starbucks, the fast-food giant will renovate its restaurants to make them more "comfortable," creating cosiness with leather chairs,......

Photo by Blainekendall.com from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. The Toronto International Film Festival is exciting as all get out. Everyone loves seeing foreign films that might not otherwise get screen time in this city, and it is a little thrilling to see famous Hollywood types having breakfast in your neighbourhood diner. The problem with TIFF is that it's just too long. By day three, many of us just want these filmic types to go......

Today’s Reviews: Juno BY MATHEW KUMAR It sounds unfair to hold directors who are the children of directors to a higher standard than other new filmmakers—but is it really? There is such a wealth of connections and expertise within a phone’s reach that it’s utterly disappointing when someone like Jason Reitman just poops out the latest in Hollywood’s line of safe, fake “indie” films that have absolutely nothing indie about them. Juno MacGuff, a......

Last night, the seats of Harbourfront Centre's studio theatre were packed with a mix of middle-aged art aficionados and well-coiffed hip, young homos all dying to see Francesco Vezzoli give a lecture and screen his notorious Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula. Vezzoli is an Italian artist known for his work in video and embroidery (yes, embroidery) who set the art world ablaze a couple of years ago with his re-imagining of the......

It seems like ages ago that calling our fair city "Hollywood North" meant something. Blockbusters used to set up shop on a regular basis and you could stroll through the University of Toronto campus and see pylons, trucks, and signs for a film going by the rather odd name "Good Will Hunting." So much hooplah and many huzzahs greeted news that The Incredible Hulk would be filming here this summer. A "re-boot" of the......

Amidst the swirl of sensationalism surrounding the death of a "caretaker" at the Brentwood home of actor Ving Rhames last week, many Torontonians were unaware that the victim, 40-year-old Jacob Adams, was a local actor and screenwriter. "If hard work was enough to make it in Hollywood, then Jacob should have been a superstar," says friend and acting colleague Janice Edwards. "My last Jacob sighting was just outside Albert's on St. Clair West. He was......

During the "Golden Age" of Hollywood, motion picture studios controlled every step of the production, distribution, and exhibition of movies in the United States. Then, in 1948, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled these practices anti-competitive and monopolistic, forcing the studios to divest themselves of the theatres they owned, and opening the market to foreign films, art films, and independent films—for the first time, movie houses that were not part of large chains......

The city of Paris has recently been courting tourists from London, England with a new series of ads that look like this: What does a Paris tourism poster have to do with Toronto? Well, the C'est So Paris ads, with their posy compositions, saturated colours and irreverent humour, bears an uncanny resemblance to those T.O. Live With Culture posters from January, only these are actually good. The Parisian ads are witty, attention-grabbing and intelligible—everything the......

Yesterday, thousands of University of Toronto students took to the front campus to protest the University's policy of allowing graduating students to bring no more than two guests to their Convocation ceremony. Their attempt at revolution fell short, and the policy stands. No, actually, the above is a shot from the trailers for the Don Cheadle vehicle Talk To Me, arriving in theatres today. Based on the context, we would guess it's supposed to......

The Toronto International Film Festival madness began today with this year’s Canadian press conference—whereas last year we were unprepared for the experience, this year we were ready. We didn’t eat lunch, instead eating our fill of the finger food on offer. Result! No one was prepared for the appearance of Viggo Mortensen on stage however, discussing perhaps the biggest announcement of the day: Eastern Promises. It makes sense, of course. Last year they had......

Toronto may bill itself as Hollywood North, but with a strong Canadian dollar, leaner American budgets and limited facilities, the city is finding itself scrambling to keep our important film business from defecting elsewhere. Though more than $700 million was dumped into Toronto's film industry last year, that was a nauseating 22% drop from the year before. The big money is in blockbusters like the Spider-Man and Mummy franchises, but Toronto often gets bypassed......

Cinematheque Ontario begins its Pedro Almódovar programme, Almódovar Meets Hollywood’s Golden Age, tomorrow and they’ve been kind enough to give us two pairs of tickets to the opening night, a double feature of Nicholas Ray’s 1954 bizzaro-western Johnny Guitar and Almódovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which pays homage to Johnny Guitar. The screenings begin at 6:30 p.m. at Jackman Hall, the AGO, 317 Dundas West, so if you can make......

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......

David Lynch, man! David Lynch, man! Does whatever David Lynch can! Spins a tale, any size, Confuses viewers, just like flies! Look out! Here comes David Lynch, man! Is he strong? Listen bud — He's got radioactive blood. Actually, wait, that last bit might not be true, but for some reason we keep thinking of that TV theme...no idea why. This week people are going crazy in Toronto queuing up to see the latest massive......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. Austinist has a chat with the ever-fashionable Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and managed to catch some local fashionistas making......

OMG! This week sees the release of Kickin' It Old Skool, a Jamie Kennedy vehicle. He plays a breakdancer who awakes from a 20-year coma and something that Jamie Kennedy probably considers hilarity ensues. We here at Torontoist Towers are astounded at the idea that somebody greenlighted a film with Jamie Kennedy in it. Absoultely gob-smacked. Moving on, Stone Cold Steve Austin plays Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man On An Island (The Condemned)......

Useful human-computer interaction (HCI) interfaces haven't advanced too much since Xerox PARC experimented with the desktop-and-mouse motif, commercialized and made famous by Apple in the 1980s. Luckily, some brainiacs at The University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project are helping Minority Report-style science fiction become a plausible reality. Grad student Xiang Cao and professor Ravin Balakrishnan are working on some fascinating HCI techniques using a pen input and a handheld projector. The device projects a......