The Ten
While I was on Spring Break last week, I rented two movies that I thought might be good ones to use in an introduction to Bible class. I wanted to offer reviews of each here. This post will discuss the first movie, The Ten, while a subsequent post will review the other movie, The Final Inquiry.
The Ten is a rather quirky film. It is a set of ten short pieces, each of which is introduced by a narrator who is having some personal problems of his own. Each piece is related in some way to one of the Ten Commandments, and the narrator does his work with two huge stone tablets sitting behind him. I rented it because I thought it might be a good film to show to get some discussion going when I cover Exodus. Having watched the film, I don’t think I will be showing it in class.
The pieces turn out to be only vaguely related to the Ten Commandments. For example, “Thou shalt not kill” is a piece about a woman who falls in love with a ventriloquist puppet and steals him from his owner. “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain” is about a virgin librarian who takes a trip to Mexico and falls in love with a man who she later discovers to be Jesus Christ, who has returned to bring about the end of the world but keeps putting it off because he is having a good time down on earth. The only part connected to taking the Lord’s name in vain is when she calls out his name during sex. The “Thou shalt not covet” scene involved two neighbors in a battle to see who could purchase more cat scan machines, while “Honor the sabbath” centered on a guy who liked to skip church and spend Sunday mornings hanging out with a bunch of naked guys while listening to Roberta Flack music.
The short stories are not really an attempt to explore the Ten Commandments. Instead, the Ten Commandments are little more than a gimmick to tie the stories together. Because of this, I doubt the film would provoke much discussion in a class room, or if it did I doubt the discussion would center on the Ten Commandments. And given the crude language and situations, I am not sure it would be entirely appropriate to show this in a classroom anyway. For instance, even though there is no frontal nudity, there are sixteen different men who appear in the credits only as “Naked Guy.”
The movie has a number of actors that are recognizable. Paul Rudd plays the narrator, while Winona Ryder is the woman who falls in love with the puppet. Other actors include Jessica Alba, Famke Janssen, Rob Corddry (from The Daily Show), Janeane Garofalo, Gretchen Mol, Oliver Platt, Jason Sudeikis (from SNL), Robert Ben Garant and Kerri Kenney (both from Reno 911).
The DVD cover has a quote from the Chicago Sun Times that called the film “Uproariously Funny!” That is apparently a Chicago idiom that means “mildly amusing in a crass sort of way.” I can forgive the film for not inspiring deep thoughts about the Ten Commandments, but the least they could have done is make me laugh. Instead, while I found myself vaguely interested in some of the skits, for most of the film I just sat there wondering how such good actors could have let themselves be attracted to such a bad script.