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30-second snippets from each track on Transformers: The Score are now on the CD’s product page at Wal-Mart’s website.

Just going by these clips, this album sounds amazing. Easily many orders of magnitude better than anything from the score that has wound up online (with “official releases” like Burger King’s posting of the Decepticons theme on its website in mind). And there are now only six days left before it comes out!

I was thinking the other day: wouldn’t it be incredibly cool if sometime or another, that there could be a live concert performance of the Transformers score? A few years ago Lisa and one of her college friends and I went to Atlanta to hear Howard Shore himself conduct a concert of his music from The Lord of the Rings. It was a positively epic experience: I will never forget listening to the Rohan theme, ...

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Superhero Hype! is reporting that James Purefoy has been cast as the namesake character in Solomon Kane. Recently, Purefoy has been widely acclaimed for his portrayal of Mark Antony in HBO’s hit series Rome.

In case you’re wondering who Solomon Kane is, he’s a creation of Robert E. Howard: the same writer who gave the world Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror. Solomon Kane is a 16th-century Puritan who is described as “somber-looking”. Something like a cross between Cable from Marvel Comics, Jesse Custer from DC’s Preacher series and Kwai Chang Caine from Kung-Fu, Solomon Kane wanders the Earth armed with guns and swords and daggers, fighting evil wherever its found in the name of God. His adventures have taken him from the streets of Europe to the heart of darkest Africa and he’s battled everything from pirates to demons. Here’s one classic depiction of the ...

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It was on September 25th, 1987 that Rob Reiner’s movie The Princess Bride was released.

It was more than 14 years later before I saw it for the first time! I drove out to my sister’s place in Sylva (about an hour west of Asheville) on New Years Eve in 2001 to hook up with her and Lisa so we could ring in 2002 together. Well that night while waiting for midnight Anita popped The Princess Bride in her DVD player.

To this day I still can’t believe that I went so long without seeing this awesome movie! It’s the kind of demented humor that I’ve always gone for. I don’t even have an absolute favorite scene, they’re all so good! But for some reason the part where Prince Humperdinck cranks up the torture machine full-blast has always made me giggle in a very wrong way. And then later on ...

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Superhero Hype! is reporting that Paramount has set a release date for Transformers 2: June 29, 2009.

Which is rather fast for a follow-up to a successful blockbuster movie. No doubt the threat of a writers strike this coming spring had something to do with it. I hope they’re not rushing things. But then I think of Spider-Man 2 and how that is widely held to have been better than the original, and how it came out 2 years following Spider-Man. Besides, word is that the producers of Transformers have already sketched-out where this story is going for at least two more movies. And Transformers started filming a year before it was released and it turned out okay: with the foundation already set for much of the pre-production work, they’ll probably be able to get to work on this fairly quickly.

By the way, the CD of Steve ...

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According to Michael Bay’s blog, he and Steven Spielberg have scheduled the summer of 2009 for the release of Transformers 2.

Sweet!

‘Course we knew this was going to happen anyway, but it looks like we’ll be seeing them giant battlin’ robots a year earlier than previously expected.

And since every other fan of Transformers has already said what they want in the sequel, here’s my personal list of things I’m hoping that this second Transformers movie will have:

– More Transformers!
The first movie was a great setup for the series and introduction to the concept. I think that’s why the number of Transformers that we saw was relatively limited. The next chapter should be able to expand the cast of both Autobots and Decepticons significantly.

– Give the Transformers more screen time
A lot of people complained about how much of Transformers was focused on the

...
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Yesterday was the premiere of Transformers in the IMAX format. The allure of watching the Autobots and Decepticons hash it out on what I call “the big-a$$ screen” was too much to pass up, so on Tuesday Lisa and I ordered our tickets for last night’s 7 p.m. show at the IMAX Theater at Exploris in downtown Raleigh.

But this really is the kind of thing best shared with friends too. So Chad Austin also got him a ticket and we got in touch with Eric Wilson, a really good friend of ours who I hadn’t seen in like 15 years. He drove a few hours to Raleigh and we all hooked up at Chad’s place about 5 minutes from the Exploris. After a quick bite at the Armadillo Grill, we headed over to the theater.

The best part of going to see Transformers last night, without a ...

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There’s just nineteen days left before the CD of Steve Jablonsky’s Transformers score comes out, which a lot of us have been looking forward to since the movie came out. Well, Marco van Bergen has discovered something about the soundtrack. Remember the unearthly chanting that’s in a lot of the music for the Decepticons, like when Frenzy is hacking the computer and during the “roll call” scene? Marco and I talked about it and comparisons to John Williams’s “Duel of the Fates” from the Star Wars Episode I soundtrack came up. The chorals in “Duel of the Fates” were a Sanskrit translation of an ancient Welsh poem called “Battle of the Trees”. So might Jablonsky have done something similar with the Decepticons music?

Well, Marco did some asking-around in the right places and here’s what he found out:

I was wondering for a longer time now what the great

...
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Dark Horizons is the first to report that award-winning actor Jim Broadbent has been cast to play Horace Slughorn in the upcoming film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (and no doubt this means we’ll be seeing him again in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as well).

If you haven’t read the books, Horace Slughorn is a fairly major character in the sixth book. Slughorn is a former professor of Hogwarts who Professor Dumbledore persuades to come out of retirement and teach again at the school. Slughorn also has a knack for getting attached to students who he believes (and often rightly so) will go on to excel. So naturally, Slughorn appreciates Harry’s already-celebrity status.

Broadbent will also be seen this coming spring in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull....

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That’s the title of the fourth Indiana Jones movie. Shia LaBeouf announced it live during the MTV Video Music Awards and Lucasfilm quickly confirmed it with a press release.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Hmmmmm… I don’t like it. Sounds way too long and positively hokey. If the title is referring to this crystal skull, then I’m kind of disappointed ‘cuz there’s much better artifacts out there waiting to be MacGuffins for a good Indiana Jones story. The “crystal skulls” thing to me always seemed on the same level of wacky as Chariots of the Gods? or the Lost Continent of Mu. In this final(?) movie installment, why couldn’t Indy be sent looking for the Lance of Longinus or the Tooth of Buddha or the Mormon Plates or the Cloak of Muhammad?

But then, these are just the thoughts of a guy who’s ...

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