Lindsay Cullen, when reading the few posts on our top 5-10 best reads on religion, media and culture, commented that given the topic, we should compile our top 5-10 movies regarding the topic.

I thought it was a brilliant idea, and asked him to offer his own. He did on his blog and you can see it here. but to summarise, his top 5-10 are:

• The Village
• X-Men I & II
• Dogma
• Saved
• Spirited Away
• Wrath of Khan

My next post will have my top 5-10 (apart from those nine mentioned in my paper, Resident Evil).

In the meantime, if you’ve got a top 5-10 film list, put them on your blog, telling us what these movies say to you about how religion, media and culture meet. Then ping me so I can publicise your post here. Otherwise email your list to me and I’ll copy it onto this blog.

This sounds fun.

It’s no secret that Today Tonight, A Current Affair, and like “newstainment” programs in Australia don’t like young people. What’s new is when government and the law step in on the side of young people and these media institutions declare war on them, and then vindicate themselves whenever possible.

I refer to a series of TV news reports titled “Stars cleared”, aired last week on ABC, Seven and Nine stations (and maybe other ones but I didn’t see them.

In these reports we learn that members of staff of newstainment programs at Channel 7 were on trial for breaking a Victorian state law by disclosing the anme of a young person who petitioned the state’s Childrens Court to divorce his parents.

Young people are less powerful and more vulnerable than older people in our society. Young people also have rights. When young people want to assert their rights they sometimes need support. Sometimes, when young people assert their rights against older people (eg parents) they need protection. Privacy laws exist in Victoria for protection.

Channel 7 violated the privacy of one child, and threatened his/her security by letting everyone know his/her name and what he/she had done in a courtroom. Channel 7 knew the law, and broke it.

But that’s not the point of the story we saw last week on TV. Instead, “Stars cleared” is abotu well known and celebrities like David Koch, Naomi Robson, Jennifer Keyte et al under fire by the law, and winning.

That the Victorian court was “starstruck” is the anchoring term in this narrative, spoken by Channel 7 news editor, filmed surrounded by silent faces we are all meant to know. This line single-handedly shifts the focus away from a media comany’s criminal activity and frames it in terms of the old fable where those who attack celebrities eventually lose out.

Why? Because they’re celebrities. We’ve given them our authority to know and show us the world outside our quarter-acre block. Media companies depend on this relinquishment of authority to stay rich, and we need to know that these figures remain virtuous. So the celebrities are cleared while their superiors (who faces don’t appear in the television report, or at least aren’t identified) take the blame. But in the end it’s the law who’s the villain.

Because the law wants to protect young people, who are the meat in Australia’s newstainment meat market. Because these programs’ only social responsibilities are to sell an audience to their corporate sponsors, and to attract an audience by displaying and validating their fears and prejudices.

I’m so mad. I’m so over TV news and I’m ready to fight this ongoing campaign of cultural abuse against Australia’s youth - the so-called future of our nation (because there definitely aint no place for them in the present).

But I’m not sure what to do. I can donate a little time, and some web space. But I don’t want to start something if something good is already happening. If you have an idea or project that advocates for change in the media, please let me know.

I’m 35 today.

35 always seemed like an important age to me, though I can never know why. Since I was in my twenties I had always thought that people aged 35 were of a different generation than people my age, of those even aged 33 and 34. And last week when I was filling out questionnaires for RMIT’s evaluation campaign I noticed that I only had one week left when I could check the “age: 25-34″ box.

Now I’m 35 I have the right to shake my head and mumble “tch tch, young people these days…” whenever I feel like it. I spent my afternoon shopping for clothes, but now that I am a 35 year-old dad I have the right to wear the same old brown cardigan (and I have two now) for the next forty years or so, just like my old man (who turned 69 just two days ago, and misses his old blue blazer).

Best of all, I am now allowed to not like change. So today I decided not to use Mozilla Firefox anymore, but go back to the old IE. I know I know, but hey, if you’re going to be a slave to a software giant, you might as well be a slave to the biggest one, right?

This aint no plug for IE. I can’t stand the fact that Microsoft has got its controlling paws over everything. I don’t want to use another web browser for the simple fact that IE places cookies and cache things in one folder, while other web browsers make other folders for those things, and I like to know where those things are.

And I’ve just downloaded IE 7 beta and I have to say, it’s Firefox under a different name. Yep, Microsoft took everything Mozilla had to offer, stole it and packaged it for their own - the tabs, the RSS aggregator, even the design.

They’re bastards I know. But I’m old and better the devil.

Thanks to Eddie for alerting us to this new business and their web site.

They take marketing consulting to the next level…

huh?