- Call any phone in the U.S. or Canada using your mobile device but not your mobile minutes
- Get a free public phone number from Google Voice, first
- Make and receive calls using Wi-Fi and/or 3G if your without a mobile plan or reception
- Pay incredibly low rates for calls around the world (with the exception of free U.S. and Canada calls)
- Send incoming calls to voicemail
Parties are not always as fun as they look like they should be. The distinction lies in the realm between watching people have fun and actually having fun. Case in point:
Groove. Set in San Francisco over the course of one night, this is the story of a rave, plain and simple. Preparation includes inhabiting an empty warehouse, finding the power supply, and sending out coded invitations. The movie kicks in as the party does, when people start arriving and the DJs start spinning. There's a nic! e moment early on when a cop shows up asking for the owner of the building, who is then taken on a tour of "a new Internet start-up." It becomes even funnier when the cop turns out to be smarter and more compassionate than anyone would expect. Writer-director Greg Harrison does a smart thing by focusing the story on David, a novice who's never been to a rave before, which breaks the story out of what could have been the suffocatingly insular world of rave culture. Unknowingly dosed by someone (his brother?), David is adopted by Layla, an attractive but lonely East Coast transplant who has begun to regret her party lifestyle. Other characters include a guy who's just proposed to his girlfriend, a college teaching assistant selling his own manufactured drugs, a nefarious lothario, a DJ who gets to meet his idol, and a gay couple having trouble finding the party. If the characters turn out to be just character types, that's OK because the movie itself floats by on its own high! -octane enthusiasm.
Groove is light and frothy entertai! nment wi th a beat you can dance to.
--Andy SpletzerDance culture, and the rave scene in particular, has been a potentially ripe film topic for years, so when
Groove was released to heavy buzz at the Sundance film festival, Sony Pictures immediately saw a possible summer sleeper. With John Digweed making a cameo appearance, as well as a savvy mixture of featured music throughout the movie,
Groove's soundtrack will do nothing but contribute to the film's success. West Coast dance fixture Wish FM, a.k.a. Wade Hampton, serves as the film's music supervisor, and he comes up with a compelling mix that nicely parallels the momentum of the movie's broiling dance-floor sequences. Starting off with some light house, then darkening his touch into deeper, more trancing territory, Wish reaches a zenith with Digweed's "Heaven Scent," using its soaring keyboard refrain as a natural peak. There are peaks all over this record, though, as Orbital's "Halycon + On + On" and Scott H! ardkiss's mix of Alter Ring's "Infinitely Gentle Blows," with its electrified vocal mishmash, provide ever-entrancing moments of turntable bliss. The movie's director, Greg Harrison, has said he intended the film to act "as an authentic document of a time in youth culture history"--his movie's soundtrack is definitely that.
--Matthew Cooke Putumayo continues its exploration of new sounds by collecting tracks from a variety of DJs, producers and musicians who may have started out as bedroom producers but have transmitted themselves far beyond the confines of those four walls. A New Groove features high-powered performances by a bevy of musicians from across the globe. The album gains its balance with other artists who step in to help cool down the pace including France's newest sensation Jehro and Australia's latest success story The Cat Empire, lend their sensibilities and expertise to round out this eclectic collection of artists. For their latest excursion into th! e arch, increasingly mainstream land of multi-kulti groove-
! meister< /i> pastiches, Putumayo has chosen a more forward-leaning direction -- or have they? As time goes on, music of this genre, with its tendency toward faux-ironic, retro-glam-showbiz quotes and neo-hipster attitude, far from being on the cutting edge, is beginning to seem downright cozy and nostalgic. For example the singer on Bitterweet's "Dirty Laundry," wreathed in chirpy girl-group references, refers to herself as a "bad girl." What can that possibly mean in the industrial West, at the dawn of the present millennium, when pretty much anything goes? Did she wear fur, patronize an unfashionable tatooist, forget to recycle? K-Os, from Canada, again looks over its shoulder, this time to The Last Poets and Ray Charles' "Hit The Road Jack" -- not boring but hardly newsworthy or thought-provoking. Many of these bands seem to be playing at being shady characters to impress their friends and audiences. The tunes are elegant, studied and even sporadically barbed. But truly dangerous ! artistic statements tend to be created by obsessed, passionate loose cannons, not anal retentive poseurs indulging in self-conscious theatrics. --Christina Roden
