Montreal: There’s some funny business going on between Canadian broadcasters and comics, and it’s pulling in big ratings for domestic networks.

Canadians may be going to the movies less, but according to Statistics Canada, they’re still getting the picture.

Thom Fitzgerald’s latest, 3 Needles, will kick-start the 25th Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax next month.

The CRTC has again given CTV the go-ahead to launch CTV NewsVu, a new digichannel that will rebroadcast local newscasts to all corners of the country.

* Julie Huguet is now head of communication services at the National Film Board, replacing Nicole Chicoine who retired last January. Huguet will manage the NFB’s corporate communications, Internet unit and festival sponsorships.

WITH A History of Violence, Toronto director David Cronenberg has made the best film of his career.

Piers Handling is the director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group and one of David Cronenberg’s earliest fans. He is also the editor of the book The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg.

Toronto: Nicholas Tabarrok is going for a magical realism vibe with his latest project, and will see the results when Perseverance wraps its four-week shoot in Ontario and Halifax at the end of the month.
The picture, a copro between his Darius Films (The Limb Salesman) and L.A.-based Catch One Productions, is set in a small East Coast fishing village and follows an aging lobsterman who snares a mysterious sea moss in his traps – changing the lives of his family and of the other townsfolk.

Vancouver: Expect to see a few new straight-to-DVD CG titles from Vancouver’s Mainframe Entertainment in the coming year. In addition to a sixth title in its Barbie franchise, Mainframe is working on feature-length animated films starring skateboarder Tony Hawk and kid-friendly aardvark Arthur.
Mainframe developed Tony Hawk in Boom Boom Sabotage with the champion boarder and retains the film’s worldwide distribution rights. Hawk serves as executive producer, contributing his voice and moves to the project.

Edmonton – Helping Canada win the battle of the bulge one TV-hour at a time, Edmonton’s Anaid Productions is underway on a new 13 x 60 documentary series called X-Weighted for Life Network.

Toronto – Director John Fawcett has wrapped the road-rage MOW Last Exit after a four-week shoot in Montreal – setting the stage for a 2005/06 airdate on CTV and, most likely, a good number of wisecracks about Quebec drivers. The two-hour project stars Kathleen Robertson (Torso: The Evelyn Dick Story) as a single mom who gets into a high-speed fracas with an overworked career woman, played by Andrea Roth (Rescue Me). Ben Bass and Linden Ashby also star.

Toronto – Harvey Keitel is working out of Toronto Film Studios until October, starring in ABC’s untitled miniseries about Sept 11. The six-hour project got quietly underway late last month with Keitel in the lead as John O’Neill, the real-life FBI anti-terror expert who, ironically, gave up his job to be head of security at the World Trade Center. David Cunningham directs for exec producer Marc Platt (Empire Falls, Legally Blonde).