Fear Of The Dark

Every man and woman with a cell phone in their pocket believes themselves to be a professional lensman (or woman). Folks, putting the democratization of technology aside for a moment, let’s just settle this right now, shall we? Just because you CAN do it doesn’t mean that you SHOULD do it – three minutes of grainy footage shot above the heads of your fellow concert-goers doesn’t put you in the running for documentary filmmaker of the year. Stop flooding the online video channels with your “content” until you bone up on the basics of videography. That minor complaint aside, this three-minute video of Iron Maiden, shot on…ahem…somebody’s cell phone, works on several odd and disturbing levels. Yeah, so the images and lighting look like a kindergarten watercolor, and the sound is distorted to just about anybody’s threshold of pain. But the band’s performance kicks serious tail and all the blurry imagery, bright colors, visual explosions and over-amped sound recreates the experience of standing there in the front row. Now if some drunken fanboy would just spill a beer on me, I’d think that I had died and gone to heavy metal nirvana….