Evans Above

I can’t necessarily name all of James Coburn’s films, but I was always aware of his presence in the industry.

The Digital Hit team was in the press room when he won his Oscar for Affliction and when he came back to the press room, you could tell the guy was as pleased as punch.

He’ll be missed.

Why is Diana’s butler still getting so much attention from the mainstream press? That’s it. I just want to know WHY.

Our congrats to the Academy for choosing Steve Martin as the host of the 75th Annual Academy Awards®.

Martin did a great job hosting the awards in 2001 and we were actually able to get back to the hotel early that night.

Hey CNN! Did ya hear about the election?

A day after midterm elections put the GOP firmly in control of the USA agenda for the next two years, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports spent the first 10-12 minutes of the show covering the Winona Ryder verdict. Okay, Robert Blake is charged with murder, but this is a flipping shoplifting case. I’m an entertainment reporter and even I don’t care about this story!

I wonder if Disney World has one of their Mickey’s running around wearing a big purple fedora, because the folks at ABC are still televising their pimping efforts with The Bachelor 2.

I noticed that the women aren’t as attractive this time around. I guess they’re really scraping the barrel to find women who’ll humiliate themselves like this, especially after seeing what the gals in the first series went through.

This story doesn’t have anything to do with entertainment, but a friend’s mother is involved in this case and the more media outlets that cover it, the more likely a coroner’s inquest will be called.

It’s a tragic story about a pregnant mother, a careless EMS team, and an awful landlord. So many unanswered questions. Apparently, the only working elevator was being used to move someone in. I know in my building only one elevator has the emergency recall feature, but surely this points out that all elevators in an apartment should have this feature.

As soon as it was revealed that American Idol contestant Nikki McKibbin once had a job as a stripper in a Texas strip club, you can be sure that millions of horny fans headed (and are still heading) towards the search engines to blow their time looking for “nude photos of Nikki McKibbin”.

I’m bored right now, so by typing this up, we just may end up as the end destination for this search and I’ll chuckle and spend the resulting ad money on a coffee.

Thanks.

The 27th Toronto International Film Festival is over. I’ve had my sleep. I think I’m rested after the 10 days, but I still have the urge to stand and photograph red carpets.

The Festival was a little low key this year, but that’s only fitting considering it straddled the first anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks.

High point: Watching the amazing chemistry between Moonlight Mile stars Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon.

Low point: Dealing with a snotty young photographer from New York who was loud, obnoxious and insulting. His good point: He united all the other photographers who all thought he was an idiot. He said he won’t be coming back. Let’s hope that’s a promise.

We’ll be fleshing out our daily TIFF reports with some press conference anecdotes ASAP.

Covering a film festival is wacky. Lot of activity — running to screenings at one location, a photo op at another and a press conference at another — followed by periods of waiting on red carpets to guarantee a great shot when the limos arrive.

It just occurred to me that I should be blogging the Toronto International Film Festival. As I’m waiting on the red carpets, or quickly downing a coffee, I could be sending off a quick update on some handy dandy PDA or something.

One problem: I don’t have a handy dandy wireless device. If there’s a company out there who’d like to loan us one for two weeks I’ll eagerly place a “Remote updates made possible by” link on our postings.

Requirements: A light, portable device that a) will enable me to use a small web browser or send email, b) come with a free access account and c) work in Toronto obviously.

The Festival starts on September 5th. In these days of FedEx, this shouldn’t be a problem. If you’re interested, drop us a line.

Blackplanet.com is a community site that allows members to create personal homepages. They’re such good corporate citizens that every single one of their homepages has a link on it allowing you to report abuse. Abuses like copyright violations, harassment, etc. Every personal homepage site should make it this easy.

It’s great to see companies acting like good corporate citizens. Too bad we’re not seeing it.

Several of their members are directly linking to images on our site. Even if you ignore the copyright issue, the fact remains that they’re taking the images off of our server, costing us money for bandwidth to pretty up their pages.

You’d think that informing their customer service dept. would get some results. Nope. Apparently it’s our problem and we should modify our server configuration to stop it. According to their manager of member services, that’s their “position” on the matter.

Call me crazy, but when a company has been informed that illegal activities are taking place on their premises and they don’t do anything about it…aren’t they in fact participants?