Extra, Extra: Silent Kids in Toronto, and a Planter Artist in Paris

By Meg Campbell

Every weekday’s end, Extra, Extra collects just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

• This silent film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Newbery Medal–winning The Graveyard Book is the work of a group of lucky kids who attended a two-week film camp, Filming in the City, that was organized by Toronto non-profit Word-Play and hosted by Type Books on Queen West. The cast—Isaac, Joanna, Miranda, Rommel, Taarak and T’saria—and their mentor Cam Woykin drew inspiration from the German expressionist silent horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They’ve submitted the film to the 90 Second Newbery Film Festival, along with their adaptation of Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me.
• Remember the ’90s, when women in Ontario won the right to go topless? R. Jeanette Martin does, but it seems the security at this year’s Toronto Festival of Beer forgot. When Martin took her shirt off yesterday (she was wearing a bra), surrounded by a crowd that included shirtless men and women in bikinis, a security guard told her to cover up. Xtra report Andrea Houston, who was at the festival with Martin, spoke to the festival’s security supervisor, who said, “If she chooses to walk around like that, it’s fine, but for her personal safety she should have her top on.” Or maybe they could try to protect her personal safety, since that’s their job?
• Toronto has seen its fair share of guerrilla streetscape beautification projects, but we don’t have the market cornered. Paris artist Paule Kingleur found a way to pretty-up the city’s dull-looking bollards, giving them some life with pocket planters made out of recycled tents. Bonne idée!
• Attention gravy hunters: It turns out that cost overruns on public infrastructure projects are totally normal. At least, according to a professor of major program management at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School, who would probably know and whose research found that the projects that looks best on paper, by underestimating costs and overstating benefits, are the ones that get built. [via @JoshColle]

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