The parents of U.S. Open champion Bianca Andreescu earned celebrity status of their own while watching their daughter become the first Canadian to win a Grand Slam tennis title. Nicu and Maria were Romanian immigrants who arrived with two suitcases before Bianca was born to be a teen millionaire from Mississauga.
Eddie Murphy is un-cancelled
A gala premiere of Dolemite is My Name at TIFF was the stage for the return of Eddie Murphy. That is, if questions about whether “the current climate” will affect his stand-up comedy style will annoy Murphy enough to cancel his own comeback again.
Cineplex won’t allow Amazon and Netflix movies on its screens. TIFF confirmed that the Scotiabank Theatre refused to book any festival movie set to pass over a release via Cineplex. (The streaming wars also took 20th Century Fox movies out of rep cinemas.)
Justin Trudeau’s journo joke
Providing a new feast for fact-checking fodder is a quip from the PM at the Press Gallery dinner in May about the $600 million news media bailout. A joke about how the press let him off the hook was clipped into an instance of something serious, if not sinister:
“Ethnic diversity harms a country’s social trust, economic well-being.” The Vancouver Sun apologized for an op-ed it published from Mount Royal University professor Mark Hecht, which was deleted from its website after appearing in print. Postmedia execs dispute that the anti-immigrant commentary is part of a right-wing editorial agenda.
The unlucky saga of cab No. 7
Lawrence Eisenberg, one of three plaintiffs in a $1.7 billion class action suit filed in response to the City of Toronto allowing ride-hailing services to compete with cabs, explains why he’s still hanging on to the devalued plate that he inherited from his father in 1966:
Rod Coneybeare dead at 89. The voice of Rusty the Rooster and Jerome the Giraffe on The Friendly Giant, on which Coneybeare played puppeteer for 27 years, also hosted Man to Man, a brief 1959 CBC Radio attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Playboy.
Finally, Bramalea’s coming on strong
Lilly Singh drew a big crowd to the big mall in Brampton to promote her clothing line, just one week before A Little Late premieres on NBC. The reaction at Bramalea City Centre reflected the hopes that Singh will draw a different demographic to American late-night shows: