Google Voice Coming

Some great news reaches us today from good ol' Google. It seems they're ramping up to release Google Voice to people who have requested to use the service (including yours truly). I tried to sign up for GrandCentral, but Google shut that down to start working on Google Voice a few days before I tried. I've been patiently waiting ever since to get my hands on this service that allows you to have one number that rings to all of your phones, plus a single voicemail to check. I imagine there will be all kinds of other Google-y features (I'd love to have my tea house fox theme in Voice too!) to explore once the service opens up.

According to the official Google blog (linked above), they will soon start sending invites to the folks who have requested them. If you're interested, sign up for an invite over here.

Michael Bay is Laughing All the Way to the Bank

I would be too, though. His epically awesome sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, took in $112m in the US this weekend, bringing its 5 day total to the jaw-droppingly awesome amount of $201.2m. This, of course, shatters, the record of $152.4m set by Spider-Man 2 for a 5 day opening weekend. What's more, globally the film took in $387m, which gives this movie the largest global opening weekend in history.

To give you an idea of just how much money this is, the movie itself cost $200m. In one weekend, the movie paid for itself. Also, as far as the other summer blockbusters go, Star Trek has been out over a month now, and it has taken in $246m domestically. That means with even a marginal showing next weekend, Transformers will surpass Star Trek after just two weeks. Also, Pixar's Up, which this weekend stole the title of highest grossing summer movie from Star Trek has made $250.2m domestically, and Transformers may well surpass even that next weekend.

So, it appears that audiences everywhere,the world over, are snubbing the critics, who tore the movie to shreds in their reviews. It's score on the Tomatometer is a downright rotten 20%, but, like I said before, it might very well surpass Star Trek and Up in it's second week! Put nicely, I'm impressed. I mean, I love the movie (you can see my take on it here), but I wasn't quite sure how audiences would react to it. I'm glad it's getting the reception it deserves though.

I spent literally all weekend arguing with people about why the movie is awesome. In a strange twist of events, I have heard people say that there is not enough action, and others saying that there is too much... I can't say I've ever heard two opposing reactions to the same movie like that before. It's a bit befuddling to argue about how there are lots of slower moments in the movie, then have to turn around and argue that there's not too little action. I, for one, think it was nicely balanced.

Regardless, the movie is awesome, I'm glad that it's raking in the big bucks, and I can't wait for the inevitable next one.

Edit: I stumbled across this interesting factoid while browsing the web today. Like I mentioned above, over its first 5 days, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen grossed $387m globally. That makes it the 2nd highest grossing movie (globally speaking) of 2009, behind only Angels & Demons, which has grossed $467.7m globally (interestingly enough, only $130.3m of that is from the US). In 5 days Transformers made about 80% of what Angels & Demons (my take on that movie is here) has made in 5 weeks. So think about that for a second. Despite being one of the lowest rated films of 2009, it stands ready to be the year's biggest phenomenon, both domestically and abroad.

Edit, Part 2: It seems I am going to see the movie again on IMAX tomorrow night. I can't wait!!!

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - The Review

I would like to begin this post by saying: What the hell? And by that I mean what the hell were all those reviewers thinking? Did they watch the same movie I did? Were they smoking something that dampens happiness, perhaps? Currently, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is sitting at a terribly misleading 22% on the Tomatometer, with a tally of 37/167 "fresh" reviews. While the reviews may be abysmal, I assure you, the movie most certainly is not.

I'm going to say two things now, right up front. First, this movie is far and away better than its predecessor in every way I can think of. Second, this came within about an inch of dethroning Star Trek as the movie of the summer.

Yes, I said it. No, I wasn't being sarcastic.

Let's break some things down here, based on the things people are criticizing the most.

Story: The reviewers say it's got none. I beg to differ. This movie has every bit as much story as the first, so if you liked the first, you'll dig the second. Actually, Chris, over at The Knight Shift said there was too much story (at least back story and hole-filling), and I will once again respectfully differ. I saw the first Transformers in 2007 with the eyes of an infant. I knew diddly and squat about the Transformer mythos - I never followed the story when I was little, never watched the animated cartoon, never saw the animated movie - I just didn't do anything with Transformers other than play with the toys. Heck, going into the first one, I knew who Optimus Prime was, and I knew Megatron, and that was it. Coming from the uneducated background I did, I got a kick out of the first movie as my official introduction into this fascinating world. Then, along comes the sequel that goes to great lengths to fill in some of the plot holes from the first and really shows us what Transformers are all about. Yes there is a good amount of back story, but I loved every second of it - it never really felt like too much to me.

Length: People are almost unanimously saying the movie is too long. I am going to throw my wrench in that right now. It felt more like an hour to me. I was sad in my heart when I realized the movie was over (when that atrocious Linkin Park song came on). There was a ton of ground to cover in this movie, a ton of it, so they really needed all that time to do it. I've heard complaints from various sources that a lot of that movie should have been left on the cutting room floor, and once again, I can't help but disagree. Looking back on that movie, there wasn't a single scene that I didn't feel like I wanted to watch. Sam's mom getting high - hilarious. Back story - fascinating. All the explosions and action - jaw-dropping.

Skids and Mudflap: The talk around movie-dom is that these two are unfunny and stereotypically, ahem, racist. I can certainly see validity to those arguments, because, in a real-people movie, they would be your token black people. Yet, in that role, they are funny. Besides, every time their humor started to get annoying, something else shut them up. They did spend a lot of time calling the token pansy in the movie out for being a pansy. Good stuff, though I would say the movie could have done without them.

Acting: Wha-what? Criticisms have been thrown left and right about bad acting, and I'm going to be honest, I just didn't see it. I'll get back to this in a minute.

Shifting gears, let's talk about how this movie really excelled. I'd like to start with the score, which I purchased on Tuesday when it came out. The score, simply put, is phenomenal. It fits so damn well into the movie, it' quite beyond words. Every single time Optimus Prime's theme came bursting through the action, I got chills. Steve Jablonsky is to be commended on yet another amazing score.

The humor in this movie is bountiful and well-timed. This is by far the funniest movie I've seen in a very long time. The best way, in my opinion, to attach an audience to the characters is through laughter. When the characters amuse us, they connect with us as well. The humor throughout the movie reels us in, and when shit starts hitting the fan, the impact is greater because of that humor.

This leads me directly into the characters. Damn, I love them - not all of them, but damn close. The first movie introduced us to Sam Witwicky as played by the amazing Shia LaBeouf, his naive and entertaining parents, his girlfriend Mikaela (here is the mandatory "Megan Fox is HOT" comment, just so we get that out of the way). Along with him we have the Marines Major Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Master Seargent Epps (Tyrese Gibson) and the lovable Sector 7 agent, Agent Simmons (John Turturro). These characters each have their own identities and personalities, and they are back in great form in the sequel. more to the point, however, they get to grow as characters, and ultimately, as people. Most of the humor comes from the fact that we understand their personalities, and there are many funny moments to be found in them.

Sam Witwicky is, as we came to expect from the first one, hilarious in an awkward kind of way. LaBeouf plays him with a wit and charisma that is endearing even as we laugh at his exploits. Speaking of the guy whose name I can barely pronounce, LaBeouf is definitely one of my favorite actors around right now. I will very seriously pay to see any movie that he's in, just because I enjoy his on-screen personas. I watched (and actually surprisingly liked) Disturbia, in which he was awesome. Transformers 1 and now 2 were both beyond anything I expected, and I even saw the otherwise crappy Indiana Jones movie, which he saved from being a complete waste of time. Oh, and let's not forget The Greatest Game Ever Played, which happens to be about the most boring sport ever (golf), but was still a great movie for the fact that he is awesome. I have yet to see Eagle Eye, though I have every intention of doing so.

Anyway, LaBeouf certainly doesn't disappoint in this movie, and in fact, I'm going to jump right out there (again) and say that he out acted himself in this movie. There were some damned intense moments in the movie that required certain amounts of intensity from the actors and he never failed to deliver. Everything from the funny, awkward moments with Mikaela to the losing his mind bits where his brain is actually working faster than his mouth can speak (brilliant acting in those parts, just brilliant) to the intense and powerful scenes (think the forest battle and the climactic battle) shows that this man can act.

Anyway, returning from my tangent - characters. Sam Witwicky = great lead, highly amusing, very well acted. Moving on to the lovely, lovely Megan Fox. She's taken a lot of heat for her performance in this movie. I agree that there were certainly some times when it was over done, but for the most part, she did really well. She was the female lead rather than just the chick who happens to be in the movie because she happens to be the hot girlfriend.

John Turturro returns in great form - Agent Simmons provides the kind of comic relief only he can provide. And yes, he does utter the line "I'm standing under the alien's.... scrotum." I laughed muchly.

The first Transformers introduced us the the pair of military officers Major Lennox and Master Seargent Epps. Lennox was one of my favorite characters from the first flick, being the Marine with the wife at home with the kid he'd never seen, then he's thrust into the middle of this machine war as he's supposed to be returning home. Gone from this movie is the mention of the wife and kids, but both he and Epps provide the much-needed human side to the Autobots, and defend them constantly from the criticisms of outsiders. I wasn't sure if these guys were going to make it into the sequel, but I'm sure glad they did.

Sam's parents made their mark on the last movie with their naive moments. For example, the, ah, masturbation scene from the first movie was just priceless. They are back with a vengeance for the sequel, and their antics are even more funny this time around. Yes, in case you haven't heard yet, Sam's mother gets high off some "all natural" brownies near the beginning of the movie and proceeds to spend a couple of minutes making a general ass of herself. Had my chair not been firmly rooted to the ground, I would have been on the floor hyperventilating.

Finally, we come to mister whiny-pants. He drove me absolutely nuts in this movie, and he was the reason I appreciated the presence of Skids and Mudflap. Leo Spitz - Sam's new college roommate, and all around girly-man. He gets dragged along for the ride and adds nothing, nothing, to the plot other than whining the entire time. He does provide some further comic relief, I suppose, as the Autobot twins are constantly call him out on his general pussiness, he tazes himself in the nuts once, and then Agent Simmons tazes him in the neck (that might've been the best part of the movie... maybe it was Sam's mother tackling the Frisbee guy.... or maybe it was the climactic battle. Hell, the whole movie is good, why bother picking a best part?).

There is a lot of action in this film. Let me repeat that: there is A LOT of action in this film. It is a Michael Bay film, after all, and this is Michael Bay at his stunning best. Under normal circumstances, the volume of action contained in this film would have been utterly boring after about 30 minutes or so. Fortunately, Bay has a very unique and wonderful style for shooting action. He has a knack for finding camera angles that ramp up the intensity and make an audience feel like they are in the middle of the action. He shoots explosions and battles in a unique and exhilarating way, and I look back on the experience thinking it would have been impossible to be bored. It also helps that ILM yet again stepped up to the plate with their ridiculously realistic special effects. They were damned purty too.

Like I said before, the movie felt like it was an hour long. Prettiness and directing style aside, there are other things that make the action memorable. First are the characters, as they are great, and I found myself very honestly caring about their well-being. Take the forest battle, an intense fight during which things happened that I never would have predicted. The reaction across the board, the audience, Sam, myself, was one of astonished, silent shock. This could not have been the result of that fight if we, as the audience, didn't care about the characters. Heck, the final battle had me on the edge of my seat with a white-knuckled death grip on my armrests (fingers cramping even now). And again, it was because of these characters that were developed so well over the course of two movies that I couldn't help but care for them. During that one part when we're led to believe that ............ I was sitting there with one half of my mind like "they wouldn't" and the other was like "ohgodohgodohgodohgod."

Second, the score is brilliantly executed, and it definitely gets the ol' adrenaline pumping.

Taken as a whole, this is one damn fine movie. Period. This is not a bad movie wrapped in pretty explosions that happens to be entertaining. This is a great movie, and the pretty explosions are just icing on a very delicious cake. Top to bottom, my complaints are few and small, and the things it does right, it does really, really well. It is easily the funniest movie I've seen in years, and it kicks the pants right off the first movie in terms of everything. Had this been any other year, any year where we didn't have the sheer amazingness that is Star Trek, this movie would've been a shoo-in for my best movie of the year. Easily. As it stands, it came literally within an inch of topping even the almighty Star Trek.

Yeah, it may be poorly reviewed, but audiences across America are telling the critics to shove their opinions. The movie opened yesterday to the largest Wednesday opening in history. It raked in a staggering $60.6 million (let me reiterate, this is a one day gross, not an entire weekend gross), with $16 million of that coming just from the midnight showing. This shattered the record for Wednesday openings, which was previously held by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with $44.2 million. What's more, the movie is on pace to break the current 5-day opening weekend record, which is held by Spider-Man 2 with $152.4 million. I predict that this will be the biggest grossing movie of the summer. Currently, that position is held by Star Trek, which, as of Monday, had made almost $240 million. Transformers made a quarter of that in one day!!

Monetary statistics aside, the audience at my (sold out) showing was very much enjoying the movie. The laughter was riotous (I was not the only one bouncing around in my seat), the crowd was hushed during all the intense moments, there were gasps during some of the more tragic moments, and the movie concluded with a thunderous standing ovation. Not even Star Trek got one of those.

Anyway, like I said, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an absurdly good movie. It was 2.5 hours of me either on the edge of my seat or bouncing around in laughter. The acting is solid, the characters are great, there is a story, the action was impressive, and it all got my adrenaline pumping. I think it still might be pumping, actually.

I went into this movie with very, very tiny expectations after reading the reviews that have been posted online; I won't lie about that. Not only did the movie rise past those low expectations, it shattered the expectations I formed when I finished the first movie. Don't let the "professional" reviewers fool you on this one - you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

Score: 9.8/10.0

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett Have Died

It has truly been a sad day. It's now been confirmed that Michael Jackson has died at the age of 50, after having a heart attack earlier today.

Also, after a valiant fight with cancer, Farah Fawcett also died today at the age of 62. Farah was an inspiration to many suffering from cancer, and he passion and heart will definitely be missed.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Score

So, in anticipation of what could be the summer's best movie - it would first have to dethrone the amazing Star Trek - I went out and picked up the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen score yesterday from iTunes. By "went out" I really mean I clicked "Buy Album" while eating dinner last night, but you get the point... right?

Anyway, the score is simply astounding. Jablonsky is in top form here, delivering yet another score that is both action-y and powerful at the same time. It incorporates several of the themes from the first Transformers score (though we are sadly missing the Scorponok theme) while expanding its horizons into brand spankin' new territory. In fact, we barely hear anything resembling themes from the first score until the track entitled "Forest Battle" which is a good 2/3 of the way into the CD. But when the music settles into the familiar structures, it's a triumphant return, and the effect is chilling.

I am very interested to see how this great score fits into the movie. I won't lie, I am terribly excited about this film (even though the Tomatometer is currently sitting at a depressing 21% - that translates, at the time of this writing, into 29/109 "fresh" ratings. To put that into perspective, The Pink Panther 2 scored 13%, and my worst movie of the summer, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, scored higher with 37%. Yikes).

Two years ago, Transformers won the Best Movie of 2007 award on my old MySpace blog, so my expectations are high for Bay, LaBeouf, and company. What made the first one so good was a relatable lead, an interesting, entertaining (even if not deep) story line, and some sick special effects for the 'bots. Couple those things with the amazing score that brought the entire movie to life, and you had a summer blockbuster to remember. Here we are, 2 years later, with the sequel that begs to be seen by anybody who even remotely enjoyed the first movie. Assuming Revenge of the Fallen keeps intact that which the first movie did correctly, this should be another fun (if not terribly deep) flick.

Anyway, I've got the ticket to see the film on IMAX tomorrow at 7:30. I hope to have the review published either Thursday night or Friday morning, depending on what goes on after the movie. Stop by soon for the full lowdown.

Until then.

Chevelle's New Single "Jars" is Awesome

Hey all. Check out the new awesomeness by Chevelle. Their new single, entitled "Jars," is utterly fantastic. I'm listening to the song for the 10th or 11th straight time right now. The song demonstrates that the band continues to evolve their sound. This song is great, and it doesn't really sound like Vena Sera. It's quite obviously Chevelle (Pete Loeffler's got one of the best voices in rock), but it has a different sound from their previous albums.

Click the linkey below to hear the epic greatness for yourself. Keep an eye out, because the new album, Sci-Fi Crime, drops in September.

Chevelle - Jars

EDIT: It appears the link above no longer has the song. Shame on whoever decided to take it down. Not to fear, though. You can go to YouTube and check it out. No video yet, but feel free to click here to gander at the art for the single and listen to the awesomeness.

Amazing Things Happening in Iran

Today a friend showed me the remarkable and historic way Twitter is being used over in Iran. It is truly amazing how this social networking site is bringing people across the globe together in support of a free Iran.

The citizens of Iran are literally tweeting live and updating everybody on what is really happening in their country as they protest their current leadership and demand a new presidential election. The people claim that the election was rigged. What's more, the Tweets persist, even as the leadership regime, headed up by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tries to silenec those who are tweeting.

Tomorrow, Iranians will hold an organized protest, and concerns are running rampant that Khamenei, who has warned that action may be taken against protestors, will resort to violence. Khamenei said that opposition leaders "will be held accountable for all the violence, bloodshed, and rioting" if the protest rallies do not cease.

The rally is scheduled to be a march between Revolution Square to Freedom Square at 4:00pm local time. Freedom Square was already the site of a fatal confrontation between protestors and the pro-government militia this week.

Anybody interested in supporting this amazing and historical movement can do so by changing any social networking, forum, or chat avatars to have a green overlay. Search it up on Google if you aren't sure how to do this. If you are interested in following the events as told by the protesters on Twitter, have at this link: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23iranelection

For any protestors that happen to stop by this blog, you have my full support as you cling to your right for freedom and a fair election. The right to freedom is a basic human right and should never be denied a person by their government, and so I wish you all luck as you show the world what it means to stand up for that right.