From imdb.com:

Johnny Depp thrilled sick children at a London hospital on Wednesday - by dropping in unannounced, dressed as a pirate.

The actor has been in the U.K. capital this week to promote new movie Public Enemies, and took time out from his busy schedule to visit Great Ormond Street Hospital to cheer up young patients.

Dressed as his Pirates Of The Caribbean character Captain Jack Sparrow, he visited several wards - including the one his daughter Lily-Rose stayed in when she was treated for kidney failure in 2007.

A source tells WENN, “Johnny was so friendly with all the children on the ward and they absolutely loved his pirate outfit.

“He spoke to lots of the youngsters and staff - and made their day by posing for pictures with them all.”

The generous star has previously donated $1.5 million (£1 million) to the hospital to thank them for looking after his 10-year-old daughter during her health scare.

For those of you still thinking about Michael Jackson, here’s a great way to enjoy some of his music along with a fun old movie. I recently discovered that a couple of months ago, a YouTube user posted fairly a high quality copy of the classic Epcot 3-D film Captain EO, starring Michael Jackson and Angelica Houston.

While there are many copies of this now-extinct show circulating the Internet, this one was uploaded to YouTube in HD. While the movie isn’t exactly high-definition, it still looks pretty good. But the best part is that this particular copy uses red/cyan 3-D to try to duplicate the original experience of seeing it in Epcot. The copy is a little dark and one of the colors seems to lag slightly behind the other, but it’s still worth watching on a big screen at home.

I’ve embedded both parts of the movie below with links to watch them on YouTube in HD:

Link: Captain EO in 3-D, Part 1

Link: Captain EO in 3-D, Part 2

But the best way to watch it is to download both parts from YouTube and play them on your TV or home projector. Generally, when it comes to 3-D imagery, the bigger you make it, the better the effect becomes. Here’s an easy way to download HD video from YouTube.

I’d love to see Disney swap out Honey, I Shrunk the Audience for Captain EO, even if only for a day, as a tribute to Michael Jackson’s legacy. But since that is not likely to happen, this is the best way I’ve found to enjoy this show in 3-D.

The news of Michael Jackson’s untimely death has certainly been the hot topic for the last few days. Most music video television channels (MTV, VH1, etc) have devoted their entire airtime to looping Jackson’s many classic videos. But if you simply can’t get enough of “Thriller” and want to enjoy the full 10-minute version at your leisure, Microsoft has a great solution for you.

Right now, you can download the entire “Thriller” music video via XBox Live onto your XBox 360 console for free. You’ll find it in the XBox Live Marketplace or on the console or you can just queue it up here.

Just hurry, because the free download is available today (Sunday, June 28) only.

From toys to the original cartoon, I’ve been a fan of the Transformers for almost as long as I’ve been alive.  When the live-action Transformers film hit theaters in 2007, I was one of the first to see it, hoping for an amazing update to a classic animated television show.

Unfortunately, director Michael Bay was the one picked to put the film together and it was painfully obvious that he was involved. While the movie wasn’t terrible, it was definitely filled with Bay’s trademark Hollywood schlock, including bad acting, cheesy dialogue, over-saturated lighting, and gratuitous everything else. But at least the Transformers themselves resembled those found in the cartoon and toy series. Yes they were redesigned as twisted masses of sharp, pointy metal, but the designs were unique and each robot did carry over its distinct personality. So I was mostly happy with the first film.

Two years later, Michael Bay returns with a sequel to his live-action Transformers film called Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Before I had a chance to see this new movie, I heard many rumblings from critics and average movie-goers alike that the film was bad. Really bad. I figured that it was just a standard reaction to more Michael Bay schlock and it couldn’t possibly be as bad as everyone thought. I was wrong, they were right.

Transformers 2 clocks in at a whopping two hours and 30 minutes long. That’s six minutes longer than the first film, though it felt more like it was five hours longer. Out of the 150 minute duration, I enjoyed -at most- 30 minutes of the film. The rest was filled with absurd scenes that seemed like something out of The Hangover rather than the Transformers universe. Filled with inappropriate dialogue and moronic new characters (including many of the robots), Transformers 2 is a must-skip, even for hardcore Transformers fans.

The only good thing I can say about Transformers 2 is that some of the action scenes were somewhat enjoyable. Those made up the 30 minutes that I would want to see again. In the first Transformers film, the camera was placed so close to the action that all viewers could see was random shiny bits of painted metal moving around the screen. For this film, cameras were pulled back wide enough to actually see what was going on, often surprisingly staying on shots for more than a second or two, allowing the action to unfold clearly. Slow motion was appropriately used throughout the movie, allowing an excellent view of the robot battles.

Unfortunately, any time a character, robot or human, opened his or her mouth, it ruined the scene. One new character was present almost throughout the entire movie, tagging along with Sam (Shia Labeouf) and Mikaela (Megan Fox) and ultimately serving no purpose whatsoever. I think he was supposed to be comic relief, minus the comedy and the relief. Add to the mix far too many scenes prominently featuring Sam’s obnoxious and idiotic caricatures of parents and it’s one disaster after another. And that’s without even factoring in the unnecessary robot swearing and recurring inappropriate sexual themes.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that Transformers 2 was really, really bad. And yet, somehow, most of the audience in the Downtown Disney movie theater in which I saw the film seemed to enjoy it. I was surrounded by viewers who were cracking up at the gross-out comedy and didn’t seem to really care about the robot battle scenes. Now I can’t stand most stupid comedy films, so perhaps I wasn’t the intended audience for this film. Perhaps all of the other movie-goers somehow knew that buying a ticket to Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen actually meant buying a ticket to a movie of the same style as American Pie, Dude, Where’s My Car?, and Van Wilder. I guess that’s just not what I was expecting out of a movie that was based on a children’s television show and line of toys. The real stars of Transformers 2, apparently, are not the Transformers. Silly me.

To wrap up, if you’re a fan of stupid comedy, perhaps you’ll enjoy Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Transformers fans shouldn’t bother.

From techcrunch.com:

Facebook is launching a new “Live Stream Box” feature which allows for Facebook Pages to offer their own live video and chat area. And Ustream will be the first to take advantage of it with Ustream on Facebook, a new service to provide live video support to select Facebook users.

[…]

Apparently, how this will work is that on Facebook Pages there will now be a way to add a “Live” tab, which will house things such as the Ustream on Facebook feature. Previously, beyond the Jonas Brothers, Facebook has tested this with CNN and the NBA All-Star game. Here’s what Facebook has to say:

Today, Facebook is launching the Facebook Live Stream Box as a feature that any website owner or developer can use to enable Facebook users to connect, share, and post updates in real-time as they witness an event online. Websites can run the Live Stream Box next to live streaming videos of concerts, speeches, sporting events, webcasts, TV shows, presentations, or webinars. Sites can also run the Live Stream Box in multi-player games, or with any other experience where many people are visiting a website at the same time.

Now we just need an Apple-approved iPhone app that allows broadcasting via Ustream and Facebook will be overrun with live streaming video.