Filmmaker John Charles Upton Jr., was shot and killed on Thursday following a dispute with a neighbor over trimming shrubbery on a dirt path of his Encinitas home, he was 56. Upton is best known for his documentaries.
Michael Vilkin, 61, was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder and was being held without bail, pending arraignment Tuesday, authorities said.
Vilkin, in an interview conducted in county jail, told KGTV in San Diego that the killing was in self-defense after Upton menaced him with a gun during the dispute. Vilkin told reporters”
“I did not go to him. He came to me threatening and pulled a gun (on) me.”
Vilkin said he owns vacant property next to Upton’s home. Upton’s brother, Michael Upton, told U-T San Diego that his brother and Vilkin previously argued about trees.
Police have not said whether Mr Upton, 56, had a gun on him at the time of the shooting.
‘I shot him; you know, I predicted him to fall immediately because this is a .44-caliber Magnum,’ Vilkin said.
‘He did not, he did two or three steps toward me and then I shot him in the head.’
Ready for the biggest, baddest Iron Manexperience ever? Well, we are less than two months away from ‘Walt Disney Pictures & Marvel Studios’ much-anticipated installment and yesterday the studio debuted a brand-new trailer that you can check out below. And if you were wondering what’s new with Tony Stark’s — you should surely wrap your mind around the idea of…. good ole fashion revenge.
Iron Man 3promises to include more explosions, more mayhem, and more cheers. What are your thoughts on the new trailer? Leave in comment section below.
Film nods in the horror genre are slowly coming in for the 2013 EOTM Awards which takes place on Sunday, August 4, 2013 at Club Nokia in Los Angeles, California. The EOTM’s plan on showcasing horror in a big way offering nods in the over 9 categories. Fans can rest assure that many of their favorites has a pretty good chance of being honored.
James Cullen Bressack - Credit: James Cullen Bressack
Director James Cullen Bressack is in the running in two categories, Best Scream Indie Film – My Pure Joy and Best Director for Hate Crime.
Jared Masters film SLINKis also nominated for Best Director & Best Scream Film.
An accolade presented by the EOTM Radio & TV Network celebrating entrepreneurial achievements and performances in business, philanthropy and the arts (recordings, television, radio, literature, film, directing and writing). View the complete award category today by visiting www.eotmawards.com Teaser Trailer: Hate Crime
Los Angeles, CA (January 15, 2013) – Now on its 5th edition in Los Angeles, California; the Hola Mexico Film Festival (HMFF) continues to showcase narrative and documentary feature films and short films by Mexican directors and film production companies. The festival will take place from May 15th…
The reviews are in — Tyler Perryplays a girl better, I’m just saying. …so I promise to keep this one short, yet sweet.
The actor is best known for making his audiences laugh as Madea, the comedic over the top fictional character from the Mabel Simmons trilogy. The character is a towering, massive, elderly woman, with a fiercely vindictive nature about herself. Some of Madea’s famous quotes are:
“Well when you gettin’ got and somebody done got you and you go get them, when you get em’, everybody’s gon’ get got.”
However, in his new film, Alex Cross you do not get the insanely over reactive but there is a commonality between the two; a willingness to threaten with the use of weapons, drive a Cadillac erratically, use physical violence, as well as use any and all means necessary to show up a wrongdoer or offending party.
The multi-faceted director brings to his fans something new….well almost. What you do get is a lack luster action packed/gangster type film. And it appears, Perry connects with his inner thug…. featuring plenty of scenes highlighting guns and smoke!
At the start of the film, Cross is beating his wife at a guessing game they play. It’s Perry’s first lead role that he did not produce, direct or write.
The film is from the mind of novelist James Patterson, the script by Mark Moss and Kerry Williamson which takes the man back to his pre-Washington and FBI days, when he was a cop on the Detroit police force. Perry took over the role from Morgan Freemanwho first played Alex Cross in the film Kiss The Girls and Along Came A Spider.
Perry is about 20 years younger than Morgan Freeman was when he played the roles.
Alex Cross is a psycho thriller centered around a maniac, Matthew Foxthat ‘loves inflicting pain on his victims,’ seriously….he says that in the film. Fox mimic’s Christian Bale’scharacter in the Machinist, with his significant weight lost giving him an almost ghostly, sinister look.
One of the biggest hurdles for Dr. Alex Cross is that since he was last on the big screen, mainstream media has been feeding audiences a steady diet of FBI profilers and forensic agents via Criminal Minds and Law and Order, all of which track monstrous serial killers.
The cheesiest part of the film, which is also the climax is a shoot out set in Detroit. During the scene, director Rob Cohen scouted out the General Motors Heritage Museum and fell for the one-of-a-kind Caddy. The “minute I saw that car, I thought it was right out of Al Capone,” says Cohen. “So wouldn’t it be funny to talk gangster in a real gangster car.” ”They get into a car you’d see on The Untouchables. It’s a fun way to bring a private conversation about,” he adds.
And just in case you were wondering, where in the hell is Madea and who the hell is Cross…understand this new bad boy character is something Perry has always dreamed of.
“I’ve been in the business for a very long time, and Cohen is the first man to ever offer me a role like this. He saw it first,” Perry said. “I’ve always wanted to, but it had to be the right role, and this was the right situation. I read the script and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this, or if I want to try to take this on,’” he said. “And then I realized that [the] physicality and description [James Patterson] had for Alex Cross in the books, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is me.’ And I couldn’t put it down, and I realized I had to do it.
I couldn’t be Morgan Freeman playing Alex Cross. I had to do the best job I could as Tyler Perry, cause Morgan Freeman is brilliant!” he said. “He played God in movies. All I had to do – or could do – was the best, the absolute best that I could do.”
It will be interesting to observe if much of Perry’s generally loyal audience turns out to see him in a major change of pace, as well as if non-fans are curious to check him as a potential action hero.
The film cost $23 Million to film.
I give the film 2 stars for effort. I like Tyler Perry as a girl…better. ( staring straight faced)
Have you seen the film yet? Planning on catching it? Leave your comments below.
French blockbuster “Les Intouchables” and Austrian Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner “Love” are hot tips for best foreign language Oscar, from a long-list of candidates published Monday. Hong Kong movie master Johnnie To and China’s Chen Kaige — whose “Farewell my Concubine” won the top Cannes film…
French director Francois Ozon won the top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival for his psychological thriller “Dans la maison” (In the House). Ozon’s film tells the story of the relationship between a world-weary French teacher and a disturbingly gifted student. It is based on the play “El chico…
Hundreds of Muslims protested on Wednesday outside the US consulate in Morocco’s largest city Casablanca to decry a film deemed insulting to Islam that already sparked deadly violence in Libya, an AFP photographer reported. The protesters, numbering between 300 and 400 mostly young activists, gathered…
The director of the film that has sparked protests in the Middle East is “upset” at the death of the US envoy to Libya and has gone into hiding, fearing for his life, a colleague said Wednesday. Steve Klein, a consultant on the low-budget “Innocence of Muslims,” told AFP that Sam Bacile — not the…
Actress Jessica Alba goes back to blond,debuting her new look on instagram yesterday.
Jessica Alba - Instagram
Alba is in the midst filming for her upcoming role in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The actress landed the role of Nancy Callahan in the sequel to Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. The film is set to begin production before the end of Summer and is currently slated for an October 2013 release.
McFarlane’s crude Ted analyzes the man-child with hilarious results
I have only seen one full episode of Family Guy. I was forced by a friend of a girlfriend to sit through it. She wanted us to watch the boxed set of the DVDs on holiday break and was preaching the Seth McFarlane gospel I had heard time and time again; Stewie this and Peter Griffin that. I seriously bailed after one episode.
Photo credit (c) 2012 Universal Pictures
See, I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to TV shows. Very rarely can I be converted to a show if I haven’t had enough interest to catch it from the first episode. I missed out on a lot of trendy shows because of this mental flaw. The Sopranos, Friends, Seinfeld; go ahead and poke sticks at me. Yes, three of the most popular TV shows in the last two decades I could have given a rat’s ass about because I didn’t want to jump in after episode one.
I remember watching the episode and liking the humor, but I thought it was a lot of softballs. It didn’t have the heart of The Simpsons. The characters were the typical dysfunctional family, but what they said wasn’t as clever as their Fox Animation neighbors. I dismissed it as being crude for crude’s sake and too obvious with its pop culture geek references. I felt it was even pandering to geeks in a way. I know I am not alone in this opinion; there are a lot of Family Guy haters out there.
So it was with much trepidation that I saw Ted, director and Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane’s debut foray into live action. The ads are what made me see it. Something told me this was my kind of movie. The whole innocent looking teddy bear gone wrong thing just appealed to my 15 year-old sense of humor. I also know I am not alone in this, hello Hangover movies!
Ted is one of the funniest movies I have seen in a long time. It has turned me into a McFarlane convert, and I will probably go back and give Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show a chance. I think it was the fact that it has human beings doing McFarlane’s dirty work.
The plot is very simplistic. The year is 1985. An introverted Boston boy named John Bennett gets a gift of a big cute stuffed bear one Christmas. He names it Teddy and wishes it was real so he would at least have one friend in the world. Voila, a Christmas miracle! The next morning he wakes up to his bear alive and talking and scaring the crap out of his parents.
Ted the bear becomes a media sensation, and ends up on Johnny Carson and the front of tons of magazines. But of course, fame is fleeting and as the decades pass Ted is soon being being busted for trying to smuggle in mushrooms at the airport, and is relegated to smoking bongs on the couch of his grown up roommate John’s apartment.
Speaking of smoking, John has managed to get a sizzling hot girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis) that met him during a nightclub dancing accident. This is when the signature McFarlane retro pop culture references really kick in to high gear. John’s romanticized recollection of the fated night is a reference to the disco dancing scene from the 1980 Zucker Brothers comedy Airplane! I don’t’ know why but finally the whole McFarlane came clear to me.
With this being real characters and not overblown animated personas, the references are a bit more grounded. Much like Airplane! sent up the airplane disaster movies of its time, I realized Ted was sending up the sappy coming of age films of our time. These references were being used to give us a really good sense of how the mind of a guy that won’t grow up really thinks. I should know I am one myself in many ways. My brain takes many flights of fancy into the movie world of my past to escape the manly responsibilities of my present.
John worships the 1980 film Flash Gordon, and loves the fact that it shows a football player could be called on to save the universe. It secretly helps him believe he can do anything and keeps his dreamer spirit alive. I have worshipped the 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension for the same reason. It has a pre-Robocop Peter Weller playing a rock star, neurosurgeon, adventurer that saves the earth from aliens.
This is also when the movie really picks up steam for Ted the bear. He is given a lot more free reign than Stewie, the baby who acts as the crazy comic relief from Family Guy. This film is R rated plus, and pulls no punches in its raunchiness. The bear turns out to be the roommate/best buddy from hell all guys have had at one time or another in their lives. Ted is the type of irresponsible man-child I dealt with personally, that wants to get to a concert parking lot at 8 a.m. just so they can get a good spot to drink all day. Soon the bear (voiced by McFarlane) is having over prostitutes resulting in the grossest game of truth or dare ever.
Of course Lori gets sick and tired of all of John’s immaturity and wants to settle down. She gives John an ultimatum to ask Ted to leave or she will. The rest of the film works out this conflict to some pretty wild and crazy results. It is not a reinventing of the wheel by any means, but any movie that ends up working in a cameo for Sam J. Jones (who played Flash Gordon on the 80’s film) is going to get a high voltage recommendation from this Movie Maniac.
So, please, if you haven’t drunk the McFarlane Kool-aid, give Ted a try. I wouldn’t say I am a disciple of all of his work yet, but I am a convert to his live action work so far. His heart is in the right place, and he turns what could have been a one-note movie into something with some psychological depth. Hey, I know it’s not hard to analyze the 2012 model of man child, but Ted makes it quite hilarious session.
‘To Rome with Love’ boasts a star-studded cast that includes actors Alec Baldwin (l.) and Jesse Eisenberg (r.), among others.(Philippe Antonello/Sony Pictures Classics/AP) Woody Allen has been globe-hopping for a while now; and in “To Rome with Love,” he’s alighted upon the Eternal City – with…
Julianne Moore was a big winner at this evening’s Critics; Choice Television Awards in Los Angeles. We were live on the red carpet before the show and caught up with some of the night’s honorees backstage after they’d accepted their statues. Julianne Moore chatted with us about the “tremendous…
After movies about toys, cars and various cute animals, Pixar moves into more traditional territory with its latest film, princess tale “Brave” — but it was more complicated than you might expect. The US studio, which has built its reputation on pioneering animation in films like “Finding Nemo,” the…
French actor Jean Dujardin, star of this year’s best film Oscar winner “The Artist,” is in talks to co-star in Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, his Hollywood agent said Thursday. Dujardin, who won the best actor Academy Award in February for his role in the silent black and white film, is tipped to…
Brad Pittreturned to Cannes on Tuesday as a humane hitman in “Killing Them Softly,” an anti-capitalist gangster movie that delivers a damning indictment of the state of the American nation. The violent tale, which director Andrew Dominik insists is a comedy, has the star working for a mob syndicate…
British rocker Pete Doherty, whose cocaine-snorting and carousing have landed him in jail, on Sunday appeared in his first film role in Cannes as a debauched young man in 19th-century France. “Confession of a Child of the Century” sees Doherty star in an adaptation of French writer Alfred de Musset…
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