When my girlfriend and I saw the line outside the Denver Pavilions on Tuesday night for the advance screening of the
David Wain joint The Ten, we knew something was wrong. Wain and crew, mostly members of the long-dead, oft-mourned The State on MTV, are the kind of people that draw cynical 20- and 30-something hipsters (or recovering versions thereof), not the primarily elderly group standing under the eaves waiting for the doors to open.
I, personally, have been waiting for Wain and co-writer Ken Marino's (also of The State, but most recently of the spectacular Veronica Mars) treatment of the 10 Commandments for a while and have been sharing the trailer (
click here to see for yourself) with friends and family for weeks.
But I realized, looking at the free admission pass in my hand, that there was absolutely nothing (besides a clever, but extremely subtle, joke on the Sistine Chapel on the poster) to indicate that this film was going to be a post-modern, pitch-black humor-laden spoof and not a simple movie exhorting the greatness of the Commandments.
It would certainly explain the fact that the audience was much closer to a congregation than a concert. We estimated that the crowd was split into thirds: 1/3 who knew exactly what they were getting into and looking forward to it; 1/3 who wouldn't get it, but wouldn't care; and 1/3 who were completely clueless and would easily be offended.
Sarah and I made bets on how many people would walk out. I said four, she said eight, which would have been four and eight more people, respectively, than we had ever seen walk out of a movie in our lives.
Things started badly, when the word "sh*t" was uttered by the film's guide (the never-disappointing Paul Rudd) about 15 seconds into the movie and brought some surprised gasps from the more pious pockets of the crowd.
We both knew we had bet way, way too low.
The vignettes were amazing, surreal sketches based on a commandment each. But it was about the time Wain busted out the prison-rape allegory for "Thou shalt not covet" that things started to get ugly.
It started like leaves falling from a tree. Surprisingly, a young couple was the first to walk out, followed by a small group of elderly folk.
I thought I had the bet in hand (we were playing
Price Is Right rules) when the fifth person walked out and things leveled off. But, like they heard some ultra-high frequency signal only the culturally lame can hear, 38 more people -- I counted -- got up and bolted right at the end of the "covet" segment (and totally ruined a great scene with Michael Ian Black in the process).
Which begs the question: Why the hell, if you were so offended by the references, would you wait until you were exposed to every last one of them to leave? As some sort of statement? Well, I'm not taking any lessons from people who don't do at least a little research before they go to a movie. Serves them right.
Sidenote: The elderly couple and their near-middle-age son(?) that sat in front of us were a pleasant surprise. We had them pegged as leavers themselves, but when the first group walked out, they were the first to make fun of them. Priceless.
All in all, the performances were great, the stories themselves were beautiful little slices of the most extreme free-form post-modern sketch comedy and it was exactly what I expected and more.
If you can take some dark, dark, dark humor and still laugh, I highly recommend it. If you have no sense of humor and a penchant for ruining it for everyone else in the theater, however, do your self and the movie-going public a favor and stay home and watch Seabiscuit or whatever people like that watch.
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Links:
The Ten -- (the trailer) (
the site)
The State - the show that started it all (
link)
Stella- Wain, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black's Comedy Central show (
link)