Havas Media Group (HMG) Canada has hired Alessia Grosso as VP strategy and Scott Nelson in the newly created role of VP, investment & partnerships. With a background in gaming, Grosso will lead HMG’s strategy department developing unique solutions in existing and emerging platforms while Nelson ensures a digital-first buying strategy across the agency’s client roster. Both will report to HMG Canada president Noah Vardon.
Grosso joins Havas Media from Enthusiast Gaming, where she led North American marketing operations. She earlier served as director of strategy at Cossette Media, where she led strategy process adoption and drove creativity for clients across verticals including telecom, CPG, retail, cannabis, and government. In addition to Content Marketing Award and Media Innovation Award wins, Grosso has had her work featured at the Cannes Lions Festival.
Bringing 10-plus years of experience in the media industry agency side, Nelson led the digital investment practice at Dentsu for the past three years. In that role, he focused on creating cross-channel integrations using a data-led approach centered around the consumer.
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
The one rule to follow is that... Read More