Egoyan makes Cannes cut for the sixth time

Atom Egoyan’s new film, Adoration, was named yesterday one of the 19 finalists that will be in competition next month for the prestigious Palme d’Or Award at the 61st annual Festival de Cannes.

The film’s inclusion in Official Selection marks the sixth time that a feature film from the Victoria-raised, Toronto-based director’s work has made the cut.

Reached yesterday, Egoyan said it was “an honour” to be included, adding “this is not something I take for granted.

“Especially with this movie. It’s a more intimate film. It’s very much rooted in this culture and I’m so proud to represent the country at this level.”

Making art in the entertainment business

American actor Thomas McCarthy is doubtless best known for his work in TV and movies. The Wire, Flags of Our Father, All the King’s Men and Syriana are among his more recent credits. But between gigs in front of the cameras, McCarthy, 39, is also gaining respect and renown behind them – as a writer and director. In 2003, his first film, The Station Agent, a quirky tale of love and loneliness, won a BAFTA award and several other citations for screenwriting. His second indie outing, The Visitor (opening tomorrow in five cities across the country), is garnering enthusiastic notices.

Inspired in part by McCarthy’s volunteer experiences as an outreach worker with illegal immigrants, The Visitor tells the story of a mildly depressed, fiftysomething widower named Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins).

An economics professor who lives in a kind of emotional vale, Walter drives from his Connecticut home to attend an academic conference in Manhattan. Arriving at his long-neglected pied-à-terre, he finds a young couple, one Lebanese (Tarek, played by Haaz Sleiman) and one Nigerian (Zainab, played by Danai Jekesai Gurira), squatting there.

Yoko Ono sues over song in movie challenging evolution

NEW YORK — Yoko Ono is suing the producers of a movie that challenges the concept of Darwinian evolution, saying they used the song “Imagine” without her permission and led the blogosphere to accuse her of “selling out.”

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Ono accuses the producers of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” of suggesting to viewers that those who guard John Lennon’s legacy somehow authorized or sponsored the film.

The producers of the film, which features Ben Stein challenging Darwinian theories that prevail in academic circles and suggesting that life could have emerged through intelligent design, said they used only “a very small portion of the song.”

“Based on the fair use doctrine, news commentators and film documentarians regularly use material in the same way we do,” Premise Media said in a statement. “Unbiased viewers of the film will see that the ‘Imagine’ clip was used as part of a social commentary in the exercise of free speech and freedom of inquiry.”

Canadians shifting away from land-line phone service: Stats Can

TORONTO — A survey shows the number of households still using only traditional land line phone service fell to 24 per cent last December, down almost six percentage points over the same time a year earlier.

Statistics Canada says it’s a sign Canadians continue to shift to cellphones, or phone service through cable or the Internet.

The highest rates of land line only service are in New Brunswick as well as Newfoundland and Labrador, while the lowest are in Alberta and British Columbia.

Stats Can says the proportion of Canadian households relying on cellphones as their only telephone service stands at 6.4 per cent – up from 5.1 per cent in the past year.

Clinton, Obama spin war follows Pa. primary

A day after Hillary Clinton’s win over Barack Obama in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, both sides are in full spin mode about what her narrow victory means.

On Wednesday, Clinton claimed her win — by just under ten percentage points — would turn the tide of the campaign.

“I won that double-digit victory that everybody on TV said I had to win, and the voters of Pennsylvania clearly made their views known, that they think I would be the best president and the better candidate to go against Senator McCain,” she said Wednesday.

Cheese shop features top chefs in May

Lumi Turtureanu followed her nose.

Possessed by the aromas mingling in the store, she buzzed past the espresso machines and the tower of cheeses, which she had already sampled.

“I was actually going to go to the gym today,” she says. “But wine and cheese and prosciutto is much better. I do love food.”

She’s not alone.

Noses wiggling and forks skewering, on Monday evening Toronto foodies crowded into the Cheese Boutique, a gourmet store tucked into a small, industrial street just off South Kingsway in Etobicoke, to kick off its fifth annual Festival of Chefs.

The event, which takes over the shop every weekend in May, gives customers free access to some of Toronto’s most notable chefs.

Eloise to hit big screen for first time

LOS ANGELES — Eloise, the precocious girl immortalized by author Kay Thompson in the 1950s, is headed for the big screen for the first time in a feature film starring a little-known Australian actress in the title role.

Jordana Beatty, 9, will play the spirited Eloise, who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York with her dog and her turtle, in Eloise in Paris, producer HandMade Films said on Wednesday.

It said it was the first of various Eloise projects over the years to be made as a major motion picture.

Beatty, of Sydney, Australia, was cast after more than 4,000 girls were auditioned around the world for the part. She has been acting in television and commercials in Australia since the age of 4.

Sweet dreams are made of this

The search for a “drugless high” has taken some strange, and usually unreliable, turns in the past 40 years: aromatherapy, Sensurround, tantric sex, yogic flying, virtual reality goggles, seaweed-embedded T-shirts…

Toronto filmmaker Nik Sheehan’s latest flick, Flicker, examines one of the weirdest modes of mental transportation ever devised: Canadian artist and mystic Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, a gyro purported to mimic the alpha waves our brains produce during dream states.

Invented during Gysin’s Beat period, when he spent his days making art and artificially replicating his own alpha waves with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Paul Bowles, the Dream Machine looks like a lampshade that has been attacked by a Rototiller and set on top of a turntable. As the shade turns, rapidly changing, flickering patterns of light and dark are projected onto the viewer’s face, and, allegedly, hallucinations soon follow.