In the meantime, check out Phinehas playing air guitar…

Not sure what to think.

I know I had promised earlier that I would chip in my two cents in the whole sex and nudity in movies discussion. The following is a tardy and somewhat unorganized list of some points I believe ought to be considered in this issue. My thoughts are primarily directed to Christian men and are focused upon the impropriety of their watching sexually explicit scenes in movies.

1. Consider, first and foremost, the Lord and Master who has purchased you with his own blood. We are not our own, our eyes are not our own. We and they belong fully to Christ, and we have no right to use them in any way which displeases him.

2. Consider what it is you are actually doing. Sometimes, simply describing an activity helps us understand its true nature. What are you really doing when you watch such a scene? Simply stated, you are paying money to watch a real man and a real woman take off their clothes and pretend to engage in sexual activity for a movie camera. The technical term for this is voyeurism.

3. Consider your own purity. I know that most men who justify watching this kind of material say that seeing unclothed women pretend to have sex doesn’t bother them. By this I imagine they mean that it doesn’t tempt them to lust. If you’re saying this…you’re lying, at least to yourself. If you’re saying this and you’re not lying, you probably need some sort of medical attention. If you are saying this, and you’re not lying, and you do not need medical attention, then you need to find some better way to use your eunuch status for the kingdom.

Usually discussion of this issue only gets as far as the previous point, as if the possible negative effects upon the male voyeur are the only or the most important consideration. However, there is much more to be considered.

4. Consider the rights of your wife. Your wife or future wife has the right to your exclusive sexual attention. Furthermore, she has the right not to be continually compared to your mental collection of images of the mostly plastic bodies of all the women you’ve been watching on the big screen. When you put yourself in a position to see such things, you are sinning against her (Eunuchs, see the end of point 3).

5. Consider the dignity of the woman you are watching. Scripture is clear that, outside of marriage, looking upon a woman’s nakedness is a shame and dishonor to her. Again, the film medium does not change the fact that this is a real woman, whose real nakedness is being exposed to anyone who is willing to pay the $9.50. The fact that she does so willingly to get your money does not give you the right contribute to that dishonor.

6. Consider the woman’s husband or father. Remember the golden rule? Few of us, if we really thought about it, would want millions of men paying to see our wives or daughters take off their clothes and pretend to have sex with another actor. Yet many are willing to pay to borrow other men’s wives and daughters for the purpose. Again, I’m sure some actresses have husbands and fathers desensitized enough not to let such a thing bother them. That does not mean that you are wronging them any less.

7. Consider your own daughters. Be prepared for the difficulty of explaining to your young girls why they shouldn’t do for other men what you’ve been paying other girls to do for you.

For now, just this one comment: I laugh heartily at these simple, strange people.

Pride & Prejudice: Very disappointed. I didn’t like a lot of what they did. And it got worse and worse as it went on, anticlimaxing with the pathetic, laughable ending scene. I literally laughed out loud three or four times in that short scene. And Keira Knightley is no Elizabeth Bennet (and she kept sticking her tongue out when she smiled).

Wallace & Gromit – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: I was expecting it to be funnier than I actually found it to be. But it was good, and very funny. “Beware of the Moon!”

March of the Penguins: Very well done. The girls watched it a few times, and love talking about it. Of course, they loved talking about the penguins that die at the dinner table with Sunday guests… but that’s okay. It’s an amazing story what those penguins do for their babies.

Bringing Up Baby: Yawn. I fell asleep watching it twice, and have now decided that I’m not going to bother finishing it. The first 20 or 30 minutes were funny, but after that it was just monotonous.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Nate DURSLEY Wilson is off his rocker. Of course, I have a theory about Nate Wilson and Harry Potter that has been independently confirmed (by a friend coming up with the same theory on his own). I’ll not go into that here.
With this fourth HP movie, I have settled into the idea that I’m not going to really like any of the HP films. I hardly saw a point to half of what was going on, they hacked the story up so much. And Voldemort looks stupid.

Millions: I liked it. That little boy is cute, and his character is so weird (in a good way) that you can’t help but love this movie.

Anyhow. We got the first movies from our Queue yesterday, and Flightplan was among them. Good flick. I recommend it.

There is plenty of edge-of-your-seat suspense, that really makes the movie a lot of fun. I thought I was going to be more upset about the little girl being kidnapped, but they didn’t really do anything to draw that out of me.

Nothing offensive in the film that I can recall. Didn’t really push a message, either, though. Just a good thriller type film.

I got 13/30 so far… I know I’ve seen at least one of those that I can’t recall the title of.

I got 18/30 on part 2. I didn’t see a lot of those, but was able to guess the film.

Josh Gibbs recently said to me, “I’m incapable of seeing in movies any worldview but Christianity,” a comment similar in tone to something GK Chesterton once said, “The more you know of truth the more you see it everywhere.”

I have read the reviews talking about Hero’s dramatic use of color and lushness, but each Christian reviewer has begged off criticism with a scant charge of Buddhism. My imagination is too lacking to find that and the reviews too cursory to convince me, but what I did see was a short history of the Gospel.

The conflict in the movie is of a King conquering the seven kingdoms of ancient China with the story centered on a warrior’s tale of killing three of the king’s most dangerous enemies. The warrior, known as Nameless, describes how he went to Broken Sword, the king’s enemy, under the guise of learning calligraphy because it held the secret to a swordsman’s skills. The warrior requests to see the most complex character for sword, an ideogram to be decoded like a symbolists painting. This trophy is later presented to the king who, at the climax of the film, interprets it.

The first stage of the warrior the sword is in his hand. Man and sword become interchangeable, here even a blade of grass is a lethal weapon. The second stage of the warrior the sword is in his heart, even without a weapon the warrior can slay from one hundred paces. The third stage the sword disappears and peace fills the land for the ultimate ideal for a warrior is to lay down his sword.

The story is persuasive because this is the history of the people of God. Under the Old Covenant Yahweh was known as the Lord of Hosts, a War God, and Israel conquered with the sword. With the New Covenant came a new sword, the Word of God, the Prince of Peace. This new sword was written on our hearts and we conquered through other means. David slew his ten thousand, but Christ slew more than the stars in the sky and sand in the sea. The third stage is the New Jerusalem, where every knee is bowed, where every tear is wiped away; where the sword becomes a plow.

We watched Crash earlier in the week.

Lots of profanity and a sex scene that I’m not sure what all was explicitly shown (because we zipped through it at 2x, 4x, 8x… the cycling fast forward speeds on our dvd player), but I saw enough to know that it wasn’t necessary in the film. A few other disturbing scenes.

The movie is about racism, and at first I found it hard to relate to most of the characters because their racism was so blatant and self-conscious. They knew they were being racist, and they were glad about it. I don’t know anyone like that. I’m sure they’re out there, but it’s so foreign to me that I felt like it was unbelievable.

After thinking on it some more, I think the over-the-topness of the racism may have been a device the filmmakers used to make explicit what is often only passing through our heads. The movie at least got me thinking and asking myself questions.

Definitely see this one.