Couple of things going on with the films released this week. With Shutter, most interesting is that it’s based on a Thai horror film, but has been, in its Western remake, transplanted to Tokyo. Reasons? Well, either “all of Asia is basically the same thing, right?” or “people always think of scary pale girls with long black hair as being Japanese, anyway.” Okay, that’s not really that interesting (who cares about Asian horror films......

Speculation has been swirling in Toronto's literary community over the authorship of The Calling, a new recent crime fiction novel, penned by a prominent and highly-regarded writer under the alter-ego of Inger Ash Wolfe. First, Maclean's guessed the author was Jane Urquhart, who denied the rumour. Then, citing as evidence a handful of anonymous leaflets distributed to publishers, The Star pointed the finger at Michael Redhill, one of Torontoist's favourite authors. He coyly side-stepped the......

Popular Québécois cartoonist Michel Rabagliati will be making an appearance at the Lillian H. Smith Library (239 College Street) on March 15 at 5:00 p.m. to promote his latest book, Paul Goes Fishing. Rabagliati will participate in a Q&A session with The Beguiling’s Peter Birkemoe and sign books for loyal fans of the Paul series. And it's free! Who is Paul? It is Michel himself, with a smattering of fiction here and there ("5......

Since fake pharmaceutical ads for a drug called "Obay" starting appearing across Ontario (and elsewhere) last week, everyone from street artist Frank Shepard Fairey (aka OBEY) to Scientologists to comedian Maggie Cassella has been fingered as the culprit behind them. Last Friday, three days after the ads seem to have launched, we traced them, with no small amount of confidence, to a substantially less dramatic source––Colleges Ontario, an advocacy organization representing twenty-four colleges across......

Many of us were looking forward to welcoming the Buffalo Bills to Toronto. The eight games they'll play here over the next five years could've been the perfect complement to our existing football diet of live Argonauts games and televised NFL matches. Now that the details have been announced, more than a few of us have been priced out of attending. The majority of tickets average into the $350 per game range, and are only......

More Rosie! More Slinger! More Star PM! (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) The Star has just announced that it has reached a tentative agreement with its unions, which means it'll be business as usual, at least until the paper implodes in a year or two. Photo by 6oh from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.......

Good newspaper headlines are concise, descriptive, clear, and––occasionally, just occasionally––nothing short of genius. And then there's "Man who stole car with baby faces more charges." Originally published yesterday on The Star's website without a clarifying subheadline, the wonderfully ambiguous title evokes at least three possible scenarios when left by itself: 1. The man and baby stole the car together. As infants are both prone to fits of uncontrollable rage, and are technically able to buy......

Antonia Zerbisias is back! After the fade-out of Azerbic, the smart, entertaining and well-loved blog she wrote for The Star, she's just recently returned with a new blog, Broadsides. For those who are uninitiated in the ways of this fierce and funny columnist, she is a regular contributor to The Star's Living section. Now, it's irksome that the topics she regularly discusses––which typically include current issues tied to women's rights and freedoms––are relegated to......

Craig Silverman, author of "Regret the Error," has published his annual compendium of errors and corrections in global print and online media, and it's a doozy. Culprits are fairly evenly dispersed, with errors from America (Obama? Osama?), the UK, Australia and Russia all figuring prominently. But don't fear! Southern Ontario media did us proud by contributing their fair share. The Toronto Star makes the list—twice. And both about the happy subject of death!A Nov.......

Rosie DiManno sucks. Every day, poor Toronto Star readers are subjected to another over-the-top, awkwardly-written, occasionally-insulting column about the day's top depressing story from the purple-streaked purveyor of pulp. Torontoist, for one, can't take it anymore: it's time to take out the trash. The Evidence DiManno Watch needed a bit of a breather for the past week, and, really, we have no one other than DiManno to thank for that. Sure, she's subtly insulted immigrants......

Torontoist has always kept an eye on The Star. Now, it seems, they're keeping an eye on us. Several weeks ago, David Topping launched DiManno Watch, a new column where articles by loudmouth Star columnist Rosie DiManno are rated on a scale of one to six disembodied DiManno heads. Our dislike of Rosie's writing is not a new thing: we've been DiManno critics for ages. In last Tuesday's news roundup, we followed up on......

Former Torontoist contributor Ted Healey came across a great find at the Wellesley & Ontario condo and townhouse development known as "The Star of Downtown." Previously the subject of an Ugly Stick here on Torontoist, the condo's advertisements have seen plenty of scorn since they were put up. The latest addition to the front facade is thanks to someone named Defy, who has decided to give a voice to the gay urban professionals artificially......

A 13-year-old boy at St. Mary's Catholic Secondary School in Toronto was arrested after he was found to be carrying an illegal 200,000 volt stun gun in his backpack.The Star quotes school board chair Oliver Carroll as saying that "everyone was shocked." Presumably Carroll was not speaking literally. The Toronto International Film Festival opened yesterday, and as always, will showcase some of the most creative minds and promising newcomers in the movie industry. More......

It's Labour Day, so a special shout-out to all the sweatshop workers who won't be reading this because they're working today and can't afford a computer on 21 cents an hour anyway. Thanks for all the cheap clothes, guys. The Star reports that the suspect in whose car police found three bombs on Friday was described by his landlord as "unstable." Ya think? Time to rethink those cross-border shopping plans—increased security checks at border......

The arduous, lengthy, and expensive quest to name the Bell Festival Centre is over. The Star described the process for finding a new moniker for the home of the Toronto International Film Festival Group in dramatic terms: "[it] has gone on for years," wrote Martin Knelman, "involving high-priced consulting firms and a committee of board members and gurus, climaxing with a think-tank meeting at a retreat in Cambridge, Ont." No small feat, then, determining......

The Real Toronto's hook is relatively simple. Filmed in the summer of 2005 by a now-24-year-old Russian immigrant nicknamed Madd Russian, it aims to show that "Toronto, known to most as a world class city has another side to it. This movie shows the reality of living in housing projects and some of the most run down areas in the city. This footage includes interviews with gang members, drug dealers and some of the......

Earlier this evening, The Star reported on what might somehow rank as one of the strangest videos on YouTube. Recorded on Monday afternoon at the protests in Montebello, the video shows the tail end of a confrontation between Dave Coles (president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada) and three masked men who seem hell-bent on rilling up him, his fellow protestors ("old guys, grandmothers, grandfathers"), and the line of riot-ready police.......

They’re trying to hypnotise us, people. They’re trying to brainwash us and subdue us by bombarding the television with adverts and by using the media to confuse us, and they’ll never stop… Until Superbad is the number one movie this weekend. Stupid movie executives. We were totally stoked for Superbad until they started a non-stop marketing frenzy that made us completely bored and, frankly, offended. John Harkness at Now is similarly unimpressed: “The weirdest......

Wondering what tragic news event The Sun will exploit and sensationalize for its cover tomorrow? Based on last week, we have a likely candidate [link now expired], though the death of another "tot" in gang violence could also fill the paper's daily quota of grisly. UPDATE (11:00 p.m.): CityNews is reporting that the boy who fell from the apartment building earlier today is, allegedly, a "would-be robber" who fell while trying to escape. Maybe......

The Star reports this morning about U of T political science student Evon Reid (pictured). Reid applied for a job at Queen's Park as a media analyst earlier this month and was waiting to hear back when an e-mail from Aileen Siu, a part-time contract employee (whose contract is probably about to end prematurely), landed in his inbox on Friday morning. Siu's e-mail simply read: "This is the ghetto dude that I spoke to before."......

What if suburbanites could commute to downtown Toronto on the H20 highway? TTC chair Adam Giambrone says high-speed ferries could ease road traffic and cut commute times in half. David Miller thinks the idea has merit, but is concerned the $25 million price tag on boats and docking facilities may be too high. The Star is skeptical, but Torontoist rarely turns down a nice boat cruise. On Tuesday we mentioned that music critics have......

Yesterday, the Lakeview Generating Station in Port Credit was demolished as crowds looked on. Toronto usually gets weepy over the destruction of buildings, but the station was a pretty ugly example of Soviet-era industrial architecture and it was powered by coal. Are you going to miss it? Andy Barrie, host of CBC Radio One's Metro Morning, has early-stage Parkinson's. Three men have been charged with pimping out a 17-year-old girl at strip clubs and......

The problem with doing a weekly CD review is that an excellent album will sometimes cross your path, only to realize that you can't get to it for weeks. Then they explode (sort of), play a show that gets covered by everyone and their Grandma (a.k.a. The Star), and you end up twiddling your thumbs, not sure if one more review is really going to say anything different from all the other ones. It might......

Developers RioCan bought the parking lot at the corner of Queen Street West and Portland back in 2005. Immediately, rumours started to circulate that a big box store, like Home Depot, was going to be built at the site. At the time, The Globe and Mail reported that RioCan planned to start building in 2007. Which is now. So what's happening with the project? In August 2006, Spacing Wire reported that activists had met......

You know all those flashy LED lights on the CN Tower? Apparently they're going to get flashier by this Thursday. U of T is set to approve the plan to build a $53 million Centre for High Performance Sport just west of Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street. Maybe their football team could start training to win a game. A 13-year-old has become a quadriplegic after a gang-related stabbing outside of Christie Station on Friday......

The Star is reporting this morning that The City of Toronto has designated the Sam The Record Man store as a heritage building, protecting the signs from being auctioned off. Kyle Rae said that "[the City will] sit down with the owner or future owners as the property is being sold, and we hope to be able to maintain the two discs and `Sam' signs on the rooftop as part of the ongoing history......

We’ve been looking for a way to talk about King Kong again for a while now. It’s unlikely you’ll remember, but Torontoist’s first Film Friday column was actually published in the week Peter Jackson’s remake hit cinema screens, yet that’s not (specifically) the reason we’ve been in the mood to mention it again. It just happens to be that a few weeks ago, with an evening to kill, we picked up Peter Jackson’s King......

Photo by Eyeline-Imagery in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. In less than two weeks, all of Sam the Record Man's contents are going up for sale at auction. Yesterday, we confirmed with Benaco Sales Ltd., the auctioneers for the property, that the most coveted and contentious part of the building—its entire front façade, including the iconic "THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT" records and "SAM" logos (minus the red backdrop, which is unmovable)—would indeed be part of the sale.......

I love the smell of police raid in the morning. Toronto Vice arrested 60 people in the Jane and Finch area this morning in a raid called Project Kryptic. They seized "30 kilos of cocaine, hash oil and marijuana with an estimated street value of $1 million" from the Driftwood Crips. That's actually pretty badass. Hey, buddy...we're not mad that you stole the Hershey bars, we're just concerned that they may be contaminated with......

It's the last day of Inside Out, and this afternoon, the gay and lesbian film fest presented a pretty exciting Q&A session with director Laurie Lynd. Lynd directed, among other things, gay-friendly fare like the film version of Torontoist-fave Daniel MacIvor's House as well as episodes of Queer As Folk, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Noah's Arc. But it was his latest project that brought him to the immediate attention of Inside Out. Lynd......