Wednesday December 03, 2008
ENTERTAINMENT FRONT PAGE 
The importance of being earnest
''Is there anyone more American than Ron Howard?''Peter Morgan, the very British scribe best known as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Queen, is outlining the reasons he okayed the director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind to helm the feature film adaptation of his Tony Award-winning play Frost/Nixon, and being very American is evidently very good. This is what he means: ''If you spend time with Ron, he has all the qualities that we traditionally think of [as American]: polite, respectful, conscientious, decent, really principled.''
My old man's new medium
Adam Cohen, son of Leonard, sounds faintly amused by the fuss over his dad's drawings. ''You can't help but chuckle at the irony that our old man is now an exhibited artist - and entirely unintentionally so,'' he says, laughing, over the phone from Los Angeles.
GONNA RUN FROM YOU
Bryan Adams is being stalked by a mother and son in London and is concerned enough to have installed a panic alarm in his house, according to newspaper accounts.The mother and son have been following the Canadian singer since approaching him for an autograph in a restaurant, according to London's Sun newspaper. The pair, possibly from Romania, have allegedly visited Adams's home in Chelsea, southwest London.
COLUMNISTS
Tracey's been working on the railroad - let's hope we see it
The last time most of us saw Ian Tracey was on CBC's Intelligence, playing central character Jimmy Reardon. In the final scene of the now-cancelled and much-missed series - which won the Gemini Award for best dramatic series of the year last Friday - Reardon collapsed in a hail of bullets outside the Chickadee strip club.
MUSIC
Surveying the landscape of a changed industry
The future of the film and music industries is high on the agenda in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C., this week. While audiences get their movie and music fix at, respectively, the Whistler Film Festival and Transmission: Live's three nights of gigs in Vancouver, executives representing the twin pillars of the entertainment industry plan to sit down and face a few demons.
YouTube wants you for global Web orchestra
YouTube is looking for a few good musicians to audition for what it is calling the world's first online orchestra.The YouTube blog invited musicians late Monday to submit audition videos to a newly created YouTube Symphony Orchestra channel at youtube.com/user/symphony.
Britney books four dates in Canada for next tour
Britney Spears will play four dates in Canada during her upcoming tour of North American arenas.Spears is scheduled to play Toronto's Air Canada Centre on March 18, Montreal's Bell Centre on March 20, Edmonton's Rexall Place on April 6 and Vancouver's GM Place on April 8.
ART
The world's flashiest art fair 'make or break time' for galleries
When the seventh annual Art Basel Miami Beach opens tomorrow, AXA Art Insurance Corp. will host tours, dinners and a $25,000 artist award with the upbeat theme The Thrill of Collecting - in the same week U.S. officials announced that the country entered a recession last December.
Gehry's final step at AGO ready for its close-up
The Art Gallery of Ontario's new serpentine 138-step Douglas fir staircase opens tomorrow, completing the last major feature of architect Frank Gehry's $276-million redesign of the gallery.
FILM
Spirit Awards announce nominees for indie films
Anne Hathaway's family drama Rachel Getting Married, the border-smuggling tale Frozen River and the Deep South saga Ballast lead the nominees for the Spirit Awards with six nods each, including best film.
THEATRE
THEATRE: NOW PLAYING
ContinuingThe December Man ***1/2When I first read playwright Colleen Murphy's account of one young man's crushing guilt after surviving the Montreal Massacre in the winter of 1989, I thought it was the best new Canadian play I had read in ages.
