Technology And The News

Hey, I know technology is a wonderful thing, especially for news media. The omnipresence of cellphone cameras allows any amateurs who suddenly find themselves on the scene of a newsworthy event to record it for broadcast later. The key word here is amateur - they're not professionals, and their footage is terrible quality because they just so happened to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, and started recording in the heat of the moment with whatever shitty camera they had. But let's stop sending out reporters with cellphone cameras or using Skype to interview people as if it's giving us broadcast quality video, ok? If I wanted to watch a indiscernable blob of flesh pixelate its way across my screen I'd go back to 1999 and watch internet porn over dialup. La la la, olden days!

RATING: 15%

The Sting

#27 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List

Speaking of Robert Shaw, The Sting is about a couple of hucksters who want to con this mean rich guy out of a lot of money during the olden times when there was no such thing as stealing or crime (according to old white people). Like all great caper movies, you forget all the little details of the scheme, so every time you watch it it's like watching it click together for the first time. It's a great movie, and I bet if the internet was around in the 70s in the way it is today there'd be a lot of Newman/Redford slash fic out there, thought to be fair I bet there's probably a bunch anyway (I'm not checking).

RATING: 90%

Jesus Camp

This documentary is filled with so much Evangelical Christian irony I felt physically ill at least three times. I don't think this should have lost the Academy Award to An Inconvenient Truth, because Al Gore is like a billionaire now, and making his money off the same suckers who are appalled by Jesus Camp (except me). Capitalism! In the end, Christianity is war without science. Well, I mean, who actually believes in global warming or evolution anyway?

RATING: 90%

Cheap Trick (Live in Concert)

So yeah, we showed up late to the greatest concert ever, and damned if that doesn't mean we were late to see Cheap Trick. But not too late to hear some true classics, like Surrender (during which the guitarist threw a KISS record into the crowd), The Flame (awe-some), and the big finish, Dream Police...which is weird. I wouldn't have picked that as a finisher, but hey, I don't TOTALLY RULE AND PLAY A FIVE-GUITAR COMBO GUITAR FROM HELL, AS WELL AS A GUITAR THAT LOOKS LIKE MYSELF.

So yeah, it was basically as awesome as Live at the Budokan, only, y'know, Massachusetts-ier. And way older.

RATING: 81% (Bronze medal in ROCK'LYMPICS 2008)

(image courtesy of some imageshack thing)