If there’s something that all critics know, it’s that it’s great fun to rip apart something that’s incredibly bad. Especially if you know the person who made it deserves it. So as a result there’s a regular bounty of great criticism thrown at Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C. The guy has foisted some of the worst, laziest, most idiotic films on the public ever (his take on Godzilla should have had him tried in the......

A massive fire at a townhouse complex on Jarvis Street near Mutual resulted in the death of an unidentified victim on Saturday night. Construction on the townhouses had been abandoned for ten months and the building was being inhabited by squatters, says a resident at the adjacent Radio City condo tower. Novelist Norman Mailer died this weekend. Kim Ruehl at Seattlest has a nice eulogy: "He was, as most great novelists are, a complete......

This year, Hot Docs honours Toronto-based film maker Kevin McMahon with its Focus On retrospective. McMahon, whose films are noted for being playfully intellectual, accepts the accolade in that same spirit. "Geoff Pevere said to me, 'a retrospective—now you have to die.'" says the director, "So I'm focusing on the mid-career part." McMahon first came to prominence in 1991 with the The Falls—which wove Niagara Fall's kitsch history with the reality that the river had......

At the end of the second verse of one of Bright Eyes' new songs, "Reinvent The Wheel"—a eulogy for a dead musical idol, possibly Elliott Smith—lead singer Conor Oberst laments to his fallen hero that "you never understood what we loved you for." Coming as the line does in the song, with guitar chords and drums emphatically struck together to highlight Oberst's voice and the backing vocals, the moment is both uplifting and tragic, a......

The most unusual aspect of Monday night's quiet jam at the Drake Underground was the absence of annoying chatter during three folk-rock solo sets. Everyone knows Toronto keeps it real by keeping still, but normally a quieter show means restless drinkers hoping to catch up with friends while they absently watch a show as if it's background music. Astoundingly, the audience remained almost completely and respectfully silent throughout Baby Eagle, again through Woolly Leaves, and......

Artists have to be resourceful. So when Toronto-based photographer Jamie Campbell ended up with a bunch of mascot heads from a failed photo shoot, he put them to good use. The result is his photo exhibit, entitled Beasts of Burden, and it's having its opening reception this weekend at the Harbourfront Centre. "It all came together out of a failed attempt to use mascot costumes in a series on motivation. So I scrapped the......

Calling any and all artists, illustrators, and part-time doodlers! Your help is requested to aid in Toronto artist Margaret Flood's latest project: the Shapetionary. What is the Shapetionary? Its a visual index of objects. It started from looking at the dictionary and wondering why some words are illustrated and others aren’t, then thinking it would be interesting to illustrate the whole dictionary, or all the object nouns...then organize them by shape. So I extracted......

Overheard at the intersection of Bloor and Spadina last night where two women were talking, walking east. Woman A: So I said, "that's not an ass, it's an elbow!" Woman B: Tee Hee! May we all have the strength to know one from the other.......

When Canadians want satire we turn TV figures like Rick Mercer, but satire, that most difficult of comedic genres, is virtually dead in CanLit. Or is it? Randy Boyagoda's debut novel The Governor of the Northern Province is a satire so dark that you can almost hear all of the squirming amongst those expecting the typical Canadian novel. Boyagoda tells the story of Bokarie, an African war criminal who somehow escapes to Canada and......

Overheard on the 211 bus, Montreal, highway 20, direction Ouest. Sandy-haired teen: At the last Just For Laughs, this comic told this joke. He said:      "I travel in America and people ask me, 'what's the story with Toronto and Montreal?' So I tell them, it's like you have two brothers. One is an accountant. The other is a womanizing alcoholic."      And before he gets to the end of the sentence, the crowd starts cheering,......

I first met Jem Rolls as I left Desperate Housepets. He was giving out fliers and trying to get people to go see the show. Meh, why not check it out. I haven't heard much about the character. So I went over, unsure of what to expect. I was thoroughly unprepared for the energy this man had. Further, I was supremely surprised at how sharp he was. Jem spouts out poem after poem, throwing......

So I had to go buy some lettuce today. A Price Chopper is down the road from where I live, at Dundas West & Runnymede (and its prices! They're chopped!). On my way out, though, with my $1.50 worth of lettuce, I saw it: one of the most disgusting and horrifying things I've ever seen. There are three things wrong with the photo at left, snapped (unfortunately) with my cellphone camera. There are no license......

Sure New York based writer Jonathan Ames looks like a badass in this photo, with his fists up in the air like he's ready to deck Torontoist. But after reading his collection of essays I Love You More Than You Know we know that Ames, can be a big softie (he dedicates the book to his great-aunt and the title of the book is inspired by something she said to him). Heck, Ames even describes......

So there we were, in the middle of our annual shareholders meeting, when SPLAT! This bird flies into the window. So I turn to Jeff from Mergers, and I say, "You know, that wouldn't be the only bird-brain around here!" Can you believe it? No, not really. But apparently it's true: Lots of birds are flying into office windows. But not necessarily during corporate board room shananagans, as suggested, but moreso at night. Birds are......

Torontoist is torn. On the one hand, we know it is our job (and usually our pleasure) to guide our beloved readership to Toronto's tastiest treats, and if those treats will fill you up for less than a buck, so much the better. But we really, really like Yung Sing's almond cookies. They're buttery and crumbly in that wonderful fireworks-in-your-mouth way that only certain cookies can pull off. And at 80 cents a pop,......

Sharp-eared correspondent Ann on the Street (or, in this case, on the subway) overheard a healthy, happy, well-dressed, and all-round extremely non-drug-addicted-looking teenage girl talking to a friend about her new favourite candy on the TTC in the west end this morning. Girl: So I'm, like, totally jonesin' because I just started getting into this new stuff. It's crack-heroin. It's not crack and it's not heroin, it's like somewhere in between.......

After hearing this bad boy, Torontoist dashed toward a pen and paper so never to forget the lively exchange. As is usually the case, two little guys were talking casually after eating pizza. Here's what we overheard, then maybe overwrote: Little 1: So I got a face full of vagina yesterday. Little 2: Really? Little 1: Yeah. It was about 6:40 pm, I was cycling past the HMV going north on Yonge Street. This woman......

Tall Poppy Interview - Jason & Bertrand, Amuse-Bouche Chefs & Owners...

"So I said to myself, 'If they can do it with a photograph, why can't I do it with a bar of chocolate?'" - Willy Wonka And if he could do it with a Wonka bar, why can't Robert Kennedy do it with Joel Gibb and the The Hidden Cameras? Following up last night's Hidden Cameras show, their biggest Toronto club gig to date, Toronto's evil evil gay-folk-church-pop 15-piece gets split up into millions of......

Joel Plaskett, Musician...

There we stood at the Ideal counter, ordering our pound of Princess, ground for drip, thank you very much. We'd never seen the countergirl with the disarmingly high voice, and here's why. Loosely abridged: Chatty Customer: I haven't seen you in a while. How long were you gone for? Counter Gal: I was away for eleven months, training horses. Chatty Customer: Oh, well I wrote a script. Counter Gal: Wow, that's cool. Chatty Customer: Yeah,......

At a party last Saturday night, I ended all my conversations with the snappy phrase, "You're Fired!" I thought this was a pretty funny way to exit a conversation, what with the popularity of the Donald Trump's new show The Apprentice. You see, in The Apprentice, Trump asks losing contestants to leave the show by telling them "you're fired" at the end of each episode. So I just took the line "you're fired" and put......