Title: The Ten
Genre: Comedy?
Cast: Paul Rudd, Famke Janssen, Rob Corddry, Liev Schreiber, and on, and on, and on …
Director: David Wain
Release: (2007)
Loosely based on a series of separate and loosely connected parables of the Ten Commandments, The Ten is what you might loosely call a “message movie.” (“Loosely” means “incoherently”, right? Because that’s how I mean it in all those cases.) Now, to take a closer look at what went wrong with this movie between director David Wain’s brain and my eyes, here is my own list of ten commandments for comedic filmmaking (not the ten commandments for comedic filmmaking, but ten of them) – almost each and every one of which The Ten violated with heathen disregard.
Though shalt not bite off more than you can chew: In its almost embarrassing desperation to be cool, smart, funny, insightful, young, mature, jaded, sarcastic, artistic, mainstream, non-mainstream, and irreverent all at the same time, The Ten whiffs mightily at being any of those things and is relegated to being mostly absurd and uninteresting. I’m not sure if the parables given for each commandment were supposed to offer any kind of modern day context for viewers to consider them in, or if they were just supposed to offer a satire of the relevance of the ten commandments in the modern world, but they did not come close to doing either. By creating such absurdly unrealistic and unrelatable (and unfunny) stories in each vignette, anyone wanting to take away a thought about the relevance or irrelevance of religion in a modern world is likely to be thwarted by the fact that it’s hard to even tell which commandment any given ridiculous tale is supposed to be about at any given moment.
Though shalt not cast so lazily: “Hey, we need someone to play a likable but confused thirty-something year-old guy who’s starting to feel trapped in a monogamous relationship that he may have jumped into too early in life and is now finding it harder and harder to resist the temptation to throw caution to the wind and make up for lost times by cheating with a hot, young floozy just to try to get it out of his system.” “How about Paul Rudd?” “Do you think he could do that?” “Maybe … I mean, it is the only character he’s ever played in every movie he’s ever done before, so … I guess it’s worth a try.” “While we’re at it, let’s cast Winona Ryder in our movie about the ten commandments, and feature her in a number of different vignettes except for the one about ‘Thou shalt not steal’.” “Right, good idea, we don’t want to run the risk of generating any kind of organic buzz for the movie if we can avoid it.”
Though shalt not think small stage performances translate directly to film: Much of the direction and presentation of The Ten is apparently meant to bring a small, live stage production feel to the movie. However, the same type of demonstrative projecting and echoing acoustics that work so well in a crowded off-off-Broadway theatre just seem silly and low-rent through the eyes of a camera. Have you ever gone to see a play that you enjoyed, and then later watched a video recording of it from the very same night and just couldn’t even make it through half the crappy tape? Apparently, David Wain hasn’t. The only person who has consistently been able to translate stage-like environments to the screen is Wes Anderson, and it is with many adaptations to make it seem as if there were none. Other than that, this idea doesn’t work and The Ten is Exhibit F.
Though shalt not overact: Famke Janssen, I’m looking in your general direction …
Though shalt not abuse the over-deliberate delivery style of humor: This is something that’s been becoming a pet peeve of mine over the past few years, and perhaps The Ten will catch an unfair dose of my frustration over it just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But they are guilty, so I can’t feel too bad about that. The over-deliberate delivery is a fad that has become all the rage in movie comedy in the last few years and, like so many other rages do, has now officially gone from clutch to crutch. The basic premise of the over-deliberate delivery is to over-verbalize statements so that the parts that would normally be left understood are explicitly stated, and therein lies the humor. This approach is especially effective when a character is in some sort of pain or emergency and over-verbalizes what would otherwise usually just be an excited utterance. For example, when Happy Gilmore is trying to toughen up by standing straight in front of the pitch machine in the batting cages, and instead of getting hit and just screaming or groaning, he maintains the wherewithal to say things like, “THAT HURT A LITTLE BUT I’M ALRIGHT.” (hilarious, by the way). This is an example of the delivery used selectively and well. For several years, Will Ferrell has been on the forefront of this movement and, to his credit, is still the one actor most capable at pulling it off. (Example from Anchorman: (after someone tells Ron Burgundy to stop singing in the bar) “I'm expressing my inner anguish THROUGH THE MAJESTY OF SONG!”). But as it began to become more recognized for what it is – a way to be funny without having to write jokes – others soon began to pile on. Dane Cook became the worst offender of the exploitation of this little trick, becoming prone to doing entire sets which consisted of no actual jokes, but just himself talking about random things and (begin Dane Cook voice here) o-ver-e-nun-ci-a-ting his words, and then re-sta-ting everything three, or “tres”, because sometimes he likes to say “tres” instead of three, times, or in tri-pli-cate for-mat, as he likes to call it, tri-pli-cate format. And u-sing alternate, or al-ter-na-tive, wordings for the same stories from his the-saur-us, or, occasionally, mult-i-ple the-saur-i, he sometimes likes to use mul-ti-ple the-saur-i for the al-ter-na-tive re-tell-ings of the story tri-pli-cate for-mat (end Dane Cook voice).
If you weren’t already seeing this lazy comedy crutch before, trust me, you will
begin seeing it just about everywhere now that you know what it is. And don’t get me
wrong, I’m not saying it isn’t hilarious when used correctly, but in the unskilled, greedy hands of writers like those who bring us The Ten, it is just a disaster. There is nothing genuinely funny in this movie, and all of the intended humor is based on the Dane Cook Theorem that anything overexplained and repeated enough will be funny.
(Me-mo-ran-dum to aspiring film-ma-kers: it is not funny, or co-mi-cal, to repeatedly use this pro-ce-dure of ta-king a ball-point pen to a sheet of loose-leaf paper and hand-writing whatever cognitive con-cep-tual-i-zations are created by the traversing of neurons betwixt any number of your pre-synaptic and post-synaptic cells, and then reiterating such con-cep-tual-i-zations in over exacting detail, as if you were explaining something in a context wherein the conversing par-tici-pants would be presumed to be familiar enough with said context to leave many such details understood, but perhaps for some reason there may be another party eaves-drop-ping on the con-ver-sations of said par-tici-pants and may be in need of ela-bor-ation on said con-text for suff-i-cient com-pre-hension of the sce-nar-i-o, but be-cause that other party is not visibly pre-sent in the current con-ver-sation, the exacting de-tail-ed-ness of the di-a-logue makes for a de-lici-ous mor-sel of i-ron-ic hu-mor. See? It’s not funny.)
Though shall market thine pot movies appropriately: I suppose, in all fairness, this is the kind of movie I could imagine a few bleary-eyed college freshmen laughing so hard at some parts that they roll off the edge of a bunk bed and accidentally crush their cardboard paper-towel tube with a dryer sheet wrapped to one end underneath them on their handmade Indian throw rug. But if you’re trying to be some kind of counterculture cult classic, just go ahead and position yourselves that way. There are ways to do it so that everyone knows what you’re about going into it. If you’re not sure how to do this, go ask Jim Breuer what I mean.
Though shalt not lip-sync musical numbers so badly: There are at least two big musical productions in this self-indulgent garbage barge (that I can remember, there may be another one I’m forgetting) and the quality of lip-syncing in them is relatively on par with the quality of subtext on Telemundo.
Though shall have a payoff: Anything … anywhere … please! A punchline to a joke, a resolution to a storyline, hell, I’d even take one conversation with an identifiable point. This movie is a neverending cycle of “set it up, don’t knock it down” moments.
Though shalt not give thine audience the red-eye: That’s all I’m gonna say about this one.
Though shalt not be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen: This may be the one commandment that The Ten did not completely violate, but it certainly toed the line. I can’t really say it is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, but that is more of a condemnation of the stupider things I’ve seen than a compliment to this movie. On a scale of 1 to 10, it may be a -5, but I have seen -10s. So I guess that’s something.
Grading Story: D
Acting: D
Visuals: D
Originality/Innovation: C-
Enjoyability: D Overall: D
