For those that don’t know, one of my passions and areas of calling is to help guys who are struggling with pornography.
For a few years, I’ve been think through how to help guys in the journey and what we all really need to live in freedom, integrity and purity in this area.
I came up with a basic overview today, that I may develop into a book, or a series of studies or even a talk or presentation that I could do at churches.
It is broken up into various sections, each based on questions.
This is the flow of it so far:
The WHAT, WHY, WHO, HOW & WHEN in The Battle Against Porn
WHAT (exploring the nature and lies of pornography) What is porn?
What it isn’t.
WHY (exploring the reasons behind the struggle, why it is sinful and how God has so much better for us) Why do we look at it?
Why can’t we stop?
Why must we stop?
Why bother?
WHO (exploring all the players in the struggle and seeing them through God’s eyes) Who is God?
Who are you?
Who are they?
Who is the Enemy?
HOW (exploring the practical steps we must take to walk in freedom and purity in this area) How do I protect myself?
How do I fight?
How do I get back up after falling?
How do I change?
WHEN (exploring the fact that it’s never too early and it’s never, ever too late) When do I start?
I may try writing each one of these as separate posts on this blog, or maybe just develop it privately to be given as studies for people to work though. If each question was one study then that’d be a collection of around 15 studies, which may be a bit long, but I don’t see which parts of it I can really kick out. They’re all so vital.
If you’d like more resources in your own struggle with porn, check out my other website that still needs a lot more work: http://www.elephantroom.info/
Feel free to contact me about this issue, or talk to me if you’re interested in getting the studies as I produce them, or even having me give a talk to your church men’s group.
I have noticed a few stupid deals being offered of late.
The main two are by Budget Direct car insurance and Flight Centre.
Budget Direct is offering a deal where you receive $50 if they can not beat your present car insurance fees (as long as you are with RACV, AAMI or GIO). As the terms and conditions on their website states, “If Budget Direct cannot beat the renewal price as verified by the renewal documentation provided, you will be sent a cheque for $50.”
So how does this work? Does anyone ever get the money? When is it more financially sensible for them to go, “Gee, I don’t think we can on this occasion lower our fees to price match our competitor and consequently gain a customer that will give us thousands and thousands of dollars over many years. Bob! Write another cheque for fifty bucks!”
Flight Centre’s latest deal is even more ridiculous.
Picture this… Flight Centre has one price for a flight and you tell them of a cheaper flight that is being offered by another Australian airline. You have to show them written evidence of the cheaper flight and the consultant has to check and verify that is it actually a valid flight. Once all these criteria have been met, the consultant has a choice – either they beat the offer by $1, or they give you the flight for free!
That’s right! It either costs them charging you $1 less than their competitor or it costs them charging you $0. On what planet does anyone ever get a free flight out of Flight Centre?
Sure, you may say that the whole “fly for free” thing is just meant to be seen as not the point and that they’re really just saying, “we will always beat our competitors”. But as the above picture shows, they really push the FLY FREE as a genuine deal that could be taken by any customer. Â On their website, there’s even a tab that simply states “Fly Free”.
Both of these deals are just ways of suckering you in to going with their business as they offer you something that it’s never in their interests to follow through with. They might as well say, “If we can’t beat our competitor, we’ll give you the entire store and pay all your bills for twenty years!” That would impress a lot of people, and maybe even get some suckers to walk through the door, but anyone with half a brain would see through the stupidity of the offer. But make it not a spectacular, like a free flight or a $50 cheque and people are blind to way they are being suckered in.
It’s like a deal that was being offered at a pub/bistro near my work. The Doutta Galla Hotel in Flemingtonhad a sign on every table stating that if, when you ordered your meal, they didn’t offer you garlic bread, you got the meal for free. They weren’t offering you garlic bread for free. They were asking you if you wanted to purchase garlic bread… At $4.90 a pop, mind you!
So basically they were trying to upsell you. Hoping that you will buy some garlic bread that you didn’t originally want or ask for. And if they didn’t annoy you with this suggestion to buy something extra, you get the meal for free! I would think that not being pestered to buy something I didn’t want was reward enough! But no, they want to pay for my entire meal!
This was clearly just set up, not to better serve their customers, but as an incentive for the staff to get into the habit of upselling. If some poor staff member did happen to forget to suggest garlic bread and the customer got their meal for free, I’m sure you can imagine who would have to pay for the meal in the end.
While the deal was on I always wondered what would happen if I went up to the counter and said, “I’d like the Chicken Parma and THAT’S ALL! NOTHING MORE!” What would they have done? Would they lean on the side of good customer service and not suggest I buy something I clearly didn’t want to buy? Or would they so avoid having to give me the meal for free, that they would still ask me?
What about if I had said, “I’d like to order 6 serves of garlic bread… No, seven. Yes, seven. That will be completely satisfying. I won’t need any more garlic bread after that!” Or what would they have replied if I said, “I’d like to order the Greek salad but make sure there’s no garlic in the dressing. See, I’m allergic to garlic and will die if I even smell it. And make sure there’s no croutons either. I can’t have any bread products or else I break out in a pus-filled sores over my entire body.”
I’m curious as to what they would say.
Would they begin to twitch and start saying “Error! Error!” as steam came out of their robotic ears?
Would they whisper to me saying, “Look, I know you’ll say no, but my boss’ll kill me if I don’t offer you some garlic bread.”
Or would they just stare at me like a cow standing in the middle of a country road, and ask, “Would you like garlic bread with that?”
I saw The Wolfman the other day, and although I had heard it wasn’t all that great, I still had high hopes.
In general, the movie gave me what I had hoped for – cool special effects, great acting, dark cinematography and lots of scenes with the wolfman doin’ his wolfman thing (running, hunting, feasting and even howling).
I am a big fan of An American Werewolf in London and always love to see modern takes on the old monster movies. I can also appreciate the idea of paying homage to an old move like the 1941 classic, The Wolf Man. I actually liked Peter Jackson’s homage to the original King Kong.
But whenever you pay homage to some classic movie of the past, you run the risk of being so concerned that you treat the original with respect that you make bad creative decisions, and this is sadly what the modern version of The Wolfman did.
Critics have complained that the acting is lackluster and almost boring and that the storyline is painfully predictable (the supposed “twist” about the identity of the beast that bites the main character was so obvious I worked it out very early on). But my main problem was with the look of the Wolfman himself.
If you’re going to make a werewolf movie, you have the challenge of chosing what a half man/half wolf looks like. Some movies, like An American Werewolf in London (and it’s late 90’s sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris), as well as Twighlight : New Moon, go with the complete transformation, and either go with large puppetry (back in the good ol’ days) or more recently in complete CGI.
This leans on the side of the wolf, but there are movies that lean on the side of the man. Naturally, the original Wolf Man falls in this category, as does another great contribution to the genre, the 1985 comedy, Teen Wolf starring Michael J Fox (there was a lame sequel to this movie as well, called Teen Wolf  Too and starring Arrested Development’s Jason Bateman) along with the simply titled, Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfieffer.
Unfortunately though, when you go for the “man who looks sorta like a wolf” style, it can come across as funny, it can come across as sexy (as in Nicholson’s Wolf) but it is not easy to come across as scary.
The Wolfman tries to go for this look while really striving to be a scary movie and it just doesn’t work. Whenever I saw the Wolfman roar facing the camera, it was just painfully obvious that it was just a guy with lotsa hair and makeup and big monster teeth in his mouth. The scenes where you see the beast as a silhouette racing through the forest are really cool and the transformation scenes are absolutely amazing, but when you turn the lights on and look at him fully transformed, he just looks like a nasty Wookie, or more accurately, he looks like a tribute to the original Wolfman.
The one thing they didn’t think about was that if George Waggner, the director of the original Wolf Man, had the budget and the special effects of Hollywood today, he definetly would have made the Wolf Man look better than a guy dressed up for halloween. He used everything he had and came up with the best he could at the time, and so it’s silly to pay homage to his film by making a monster that looks cheap and fake by today’s standards.
Personally, the style of movie werewolf that I like the best is the wolf/man hybrid, where they don’t lean on the side of the wolf or the man, but try to create a completely unique mix of the two.
The easy way to do this is just put a big wolf’s head on a muscle-bound actor and you can do this on a low budget (like in the movie Dog Soldiers) or you can do it with a big budget (as in the Lycans in the Underworld Series).
The problem with this look is that the fake wolf head never looks very realistic and never moves with the fluid dynamics that a real beast would. Often they avoid using CGI and go for an anamatronic head and face, but no matter how big the budget, they never quite get it. See for example, the above clip from the 2009 film Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. It had a budget of 35 million to play with and this is as good as it gets?
As for CGI werewolves, I have to say that my favourite is actually the one that Hugh Jackman turns into in the 2004 crap movie Van Helsing. The movie flopped and the werewolf was in unconvincing CGI, but it had the physique of the sort of werewolf that I would love to see more of.
The only movie I could find that did a strong, scary, non-CGI werewolf that is pretty decent is a 1996 film called Bad Moon. The anamatronics are not very sophisticated, but even with only a 5th of the budget of Underworld, they came up with something genuinely scary. I haven’t seen the whole movie, but this clip might show you what I mean (be aware, this clip is a little bit gory).
What I would really love to see is someone combine both a physical actor and a CGI wolf head to create a truly realistic werewolf creature. We’ve seen this combination of live action and CGI improve increadibly over the last couple of years with movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Where the Wild Things Are, both of which include live characters with CGI heads or faces. I’d love to see what they could you using this technique to create a memorable monster.
Sadly, The Wolfman, in its efforts to pay its respects to an great old cheesy movie, ended up making something that came off as old and cheesy, but definetly wasn’t great.
In its desire to honour a classic, it sadly missed the opportunity to become a classic itself, and so while the 1941 Wolf Man will forever be remembered as one of the great original monster movies, the 2010 Wolfman will very quickly be forgotten.
