NEWS, BUZZ & RUMOURS
TIME FOR TIFF
Canada is gearing up for the 41st annual Toronto International Film Festival, and the lineup is bonkers. Highlights include Denis Villeneuve and Amy Adams’ space epic Arrival, Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg’s oil spill flick Deepwater Horizon, Brie Larson and Ben Wheatley’s gangster flick Free Fire, Jim Jarmusch’s Iggy and the Stooges doc Gimme Danger, Jeff Nichols’ interracial marriage tearjerker Loving, Antoine Fuqua’s star-studded western The Magnificent Seven, Christopher Guest’s new mockumentary Mascots and Oliver Stone’s long-awaited Snowden. TIFF will overwhelm with options from September 8 to 18.
HE WAS RIGHT, HE’S BACK
While producers continue to force new Terminator content, nothing has lived up to the first two — although now Terminator tech is becoming a reality. Researchers in Australia have discovered a new form of malleable liquid metal, meaning the shape-shifting T-1000 could, theoretically, exist. Adding to the real-life chaos, Toronto police were recently called after reports of a mysterious man with a gun. It turned out to be a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Terminator garb. Hasta la vista, baby!
TORRENT TORMENT
Internet pirates have had a few major shipwrecks in the last few weeks as torrent sites around the world are being buried at sea. KickassTorrents was the latest true torrent site to get the boot following a covert team-up between Apple and the FBI that resulted in the arrest of its alleged Ukrainian founder. Making matters worse, the long-running search aggregator Torrentz also ceased operations, making it more difficult than ever to steal other people’s intellectual property.
SUICIDE SQUABBLE
David Ayer’s wacky Hot Topic supervillain movie, Suicide Squad, was precisely as terrible as its premise suggested. Nary a critic found anything nice to say about it, meaning its Rotten Tomatoes score is pitifully low. A small pocket of comic nerds came up with the perfect solution: launching a Change.org petition that demands Rotten Tomatoes be shut down. Soon after he created it, Abdullah Coldwater realized that a petition probably can’t have a website shut down. As such, it’s since been renamed “don’t listen to film criticism” and has amassed over 22,000 signatures.
CAUGHT A HERZOG
In news that should surprise precisely no one, eternally pessimistic filmmaker Werner Herzog is not a fan of Pokémon Go. The nihilist naysayer was asked about the mega-viral augmented reality videogame in an interview with The Verge, and he responded in the most Werner Herzog way imaginable. “Physically, do they fight?” he asked of the game’s users. “Do they bite each other’s hands? Do they punch each other?” It has us wishing that Herzog would become a videogame reviewer.