plus 3, Teens arrested for stealing chipmunk figure from Gurnee movie theater - Herald & Review

Teens arrested for stealing chipmunk figure from Gurnee movie theater - Herald & Review
New Shrek Movie at Tribeca Film Festival - The Celebrity Cafe.com
Oliver Stone shocked on his revisit to Wall Street - Daily News and Analysis
Los Angeles businessman agrees to remove huge movie ad from building near site of Oscars - Washington Examiner

Teens arrested for stealing chipmunk figure from Gurnee movie theater - Herald & Review

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 06:31 AM PST

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Associated Press | Posted: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 9:00 am | Loading…

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GURNEE (AP) - Police in the northern Chicago suburb of Gurnee say they have charged three teenagers with the theft of a 4-foot-tall plastic figure of "Simon,'' the Chipmunk.

"Simon,'' who was part of a display promoting "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,'' movie, disappeared Feb. 11 from the lobby of the Gurnee Cinema. A surveillance tape showed people shoving the plastic rodent into a car and driving off.

Gurnee Police Cmdr. Jay J. Patrick says two 18-year-olds and one 16-year-old were apprehended after one of them posted something on a social networking Web site alluding to an alleged plan to steal "Simon's'' pal, "Theodore.''

"Simon'' was recovered in the basement of a Beach Park home and the three teenagers were charged with violation of a local ordinance.

Posted in Local, State-and-regional, Weird-news, Movies on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 9:00 am | Tags:

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New Shrek Movie at Tribeca Film Festival - The Celebrity Cafe.com

Posted: 01 Mar 2010 10:14 AM PST

Everyone's favorite cantankerous, green ogre is back for his fourth and final film Shrek Forever After. Even better is that the new film will open this year's Tribeca Film festival in New York.

Shrek Forever After will reunite the star talents of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, and Antonio Banderas. It will be the last in the Shrek series and the first to be released in 3D.

In the movie, Shrek is missing the good old days of when he was a "real ogre" instead of a domesticated family man. Enter Rumpelstiltskin, who tricks Shrek into signing a contract to get exactly that, but at a price: the result is a world where he and Fiona never met and Far Far Away is ruled by the little gnome.

This will be the ninth annual Tribeca Film Festival-- the event was started by Robert DeNiro-- and will run from April 21 to May 2. The rest of the line up for the festival will be announced in the coming weeks.

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Oliver Stone shocked on his revisit to Wall Street - Daily News and Analysis

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 07:02 PM PST

Los Angeles: Director Oliver Stone was shocked when he revisited the world of high finance for the sequel to his 1987 hit movie Wall Street, describing what was happening there as the "collapse of capitalism."

"Why did I go back?...Because it's important. It's the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society. It is. Our way of life is going to change," Stone told Vanity Fair magazine in an interview.

"I was truly, truly shocked when I went back (to Wall Street)," the Oscar-winning director told the magazine in an interview for its April edition.

"A million dollars had become a billion dollars. They'd replaced people of substance with people who made money. The Volckers had become the Greenspans," he said.

But Stone said his first aim, as always, was to tell an entertaining story. "And to tell a story of financial manipulation on Wall Street is one of the hardest things you can do."

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which features the return of Michael Douglas as disgraced insider trader Gordon Gekko, opens in the United States on April 23.

Gekko, just out of jail, wants back in the game in a tale set at a time when the global economy is teetering on the brink of disaster.

Transformers star Shia LaBeouf, 23, plays the role of an analyst of alternative energy companies at two Wall Street firms -- one modelled on investment bank Goldman Sachs and the other on its collapsed rival Bear Stearns.

Stone said his late father, who worked for a brokerage firm, had encouraged him years ago to work on Wall St.

"But I wasn't any good at mathematics," Stone said, adding, "I tried hard to understand Enron. I read three books. I couldn't understand a...thing."

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Los Angeles businessman agrees to remove huge movie ad from building near site of Oscars - Washington Examiner

Posted: 02 Mar 2010 05:33 AM PST

LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles businessman who was arrested for investigation of draping a building with a massive movie billboard near the site of the upcoming Oscars agreed to remove the sign Monday in exchange for a drastic reduction of his bail.

Superior Court Judge Mildred Escobedo accepted the deal between Kayvan Setareh's lawyers and the city attorney's office, which dropped his bail from $1 million to $100,000 after Setareh agreed to have a crew begin removing the eight-story ad by Monday night.

Setareh, 49, attended the hearing in an enclosed pen reserved for defendants in custody, standing silently behind the glass wearing glasses and unkempt longish hair. His attorney, Andrew Stein, said he was expected to post bail later in the day.

Setareh is the first person to face criminal charges under a new citywide ban on enormous building-cloaking ads known as supergraphics, part of what authorities called a new strategy of vigorous sign-law enforcement by the city attorney's office.

His arrest came less than a week after the office filed its first civil complaint under the ban, against a business accused of installing supergraphic signs at 12 Los Angeles locations.

Stein said he did not believe the sign was a safety hazard, as prosecutors alleged. He said the city had aggressively gone after his client as a warning to other would-be supergraphic scofflaws.

"He feels like he's the unlucky guy who put up the wrong sign at the wrong time," Stein said after the hearing.

Setareh is due back in court March 30.

Authorities said Setareh arranged for the ad for DreamWorks Animation LLC's upcoming movie "How to Train Your Dragon" to be hung on a Hollywood Boulevard building he owns near the Kodak Theatre, the site of Sunday's Academy Awards.

He was accused of posting the unpermitted sign despite repeated warnings that it would violate city safety codes and the ban passed last year by the City Council on supergraphics.

"This was an individual who was warned and had every opportunity to comply with the law and did not," Senior Assistant City Attorney Chuck Goldenberg said.

Stein said he has seen no evidence that his client had received a warning. He assailed Escobedo for approving the $1 million bail that prosecutors requested when Setareh was arrested Friday on suspicion of three misdemeanor city code violations.

Endorsing a bail amount usually reserved for more serious offenses such as rape and kidnapping is the "most outrageous abuse of discretion that I've seen by any judicial officer exercise," he said.

Setareh's deal with prosecutors stipulates that he must have the sign removed by 6 a.m. Wednesday.

DreamWorks Animation referred questions to Paramount Pictures, which was handling marketing for "How to Train Your Dragon." Paramount, a unit of Viacom Inc., said in a statement that it had been assured that the site had all appropriate permits.

A spokeswoman did not respond to an e-mail seeking details about the advertising contract and asking whether the sign was supposed to have remained through the Oscars broadcast, where it could have been visible to TV cameras covering the event.

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