The Ten
Paul Rudd, Gretchen Moll, Winona Ryder
Written and directed by David Wain
City Lights 2008
93 minutes
It’s not that The Ten DVD is bad more than it is too atrocious to be a good bad movie. The Ten is a short scenes stuck together comedy very loosely based on the Ten Commandments and as funny as two blank stone tablets. The soundtrack often buries the dialogue or narrative and this does not help this comedy get the very few laughs it elicits from its frat house low brow humor.
You get the feeling writer director David Wain of Wet Hot American Summer fame wrote a few premises for a full-length comedy and then decided none of them had the legs to be a movie but might make funny enough shorts. Stuck with ten shorts, Wain then had to come up with a link. What ten first comes to anybody’s mind? Why bother trying harder for a link? Why bother getting the ten commandments right? Why bother getting the correct wording for the ones you did get right?
I get the feeling Wain is a lazy writer and director and The Ten is the result. There is not much in The Ten that is original. For example, this movie was written and made in 2007 and it uses a Gloria Steinem feminist bra burning joke. Direction wise there is a ground level shot in the first sketch where the pant leg of the character cuts the screen: this is not a joke or any artistic trick just lazy filming and the kind of thing that would get you an F in film school. Hell, even the hair and make up person got lazy here. How else can you explain Paul Rudd’s Spock ears?
There is one good moment in The Ten when Oliver Platt gets to impersonate Ahnold. The second covet sketch with Wynona Ryder is almost good but too much of a mess to work.
The Ten … the first should have been though shalt not make such a godawful movie.