Cadence Weapon must have sensed that the damp audience at Dundas Square needed a pick-me-up, so when he took the stage at TIFF’s closing ceremony on Saturday, he did a brief imitation of bellicose rapper Fat Joe’s “I Make It Rain.” It’s even funnier when you consider the Edmonton rapper’s own, un-thuggish style: he wore an embroidered shirt made by his grandma, who he said was about 80 and to whom he dedicated a song about cellphones. He also poked fun of the audience’s umbrella-in-one-hand clapping and allowed three cute, soaking boys to be his dance crew onstage. Even though it began to pour, Cadence and DJ Skratch Bastid attracted a pretty large crowd by making people smile, dance and forget the festival was over. When he asked the (mostly young) audience if they’d seen a lot of movies, a rather unenthusiastic grumble gave him his answer. “What is a movie, anyway? A bunch of moving pictures?” he mused. Just like…life? “Think about it,” he said.—Melita Kuburas“

Stunt questions on the red carpet are hard to pull off, which is why we thought it was totally cute when interviewer Colanthony Humphrey asked stars what lyrics they would add to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” “Um, imagine all the…Starbucks,” joked Corner Gas’s Tara Spencer-Nairn. “Imagine all the shoes…I’m a shallow, shallow person.” Humphrey and his cameraman were from the John Lennon Bus, a mobile recording studio that was parked outside the CTV building until Wednesday, training young people, some from the Jane and Finch area, to become talented, bona-fide, all-access members of the entertainment industry. Their mentor, Sol Guy from MTV Canada’s 4Real, gave us a tour of the bus—a total dream hangout, with its fancy, state-of-the-art equipment and youths sprawled about playing guitar, writing songs, making music videos, slacking off, etc.

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