Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Ten / USA / 2007

U.S. cinema needs more David Wain. The Ten, Wain’s first film since 2001, contains a level of comedic genius rarely seen in contemporary cinema, and I say this with Over Hear Dead Body and Witless Protection on the horizon, not to mention another Paris Hilton vehicle. And yes, I realize that “genius” is the penultimate of overused cliché in modern film criticism, thrown around like a piece of laundry whenever the cool wind changes. But you can’t deny the utter ingenuity of having two suburban fathers, each with a wife and child, and each living in near identical houses, using CAT-Scan machines to one-up each other, only to be gone when those machines are needed. Or Winona Ryder, in the chapter on Though Shalt Not Steal, falling in love with a ventriloquist’s dummy, leading to an extremely perverse yet undeniably hilarious montage of intense woman-on-puppet sex. Prison inmates living a life more accustomed to “Desperate Housewives,” in which love between cellmates is lost over newfound emotions, or a group of men skipping church with school-boy excuses to dance around a home, naked, to Roberta Flack music.

But more importantly, these small yet interconnected vignettes act like lucid, ironic reflections on our society as a whole. It can’t be coincidence that those two fathers, competing with large and expensive medical devices, live cookie-cutter existences, or that they buy so many machines while living in a dangerously health-conscious culture. (They could easily have bought sofas or cars; though lacking any form of sly comedy, it would have been more believable.) You could argue that the final commandment, in which those husbands bare all, is funny because it illuminates the dominance of “masculinity” over Emersonian will and expression, or how Winona Ryder’s overpowering love of a lifeless doll is our constant struggle to attain the idealistic perfection we so constantly yearn to find our spouses and significant others. Or, I suppose, you could lie back and take it all as mindless fun, which it also is.

Rumsey’s Review

by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
06 Feb 2008 9:13 AM | Comments (3)

Comments / 3 total / Submit Comment

1. Devin / 6 February 2008 / 10:20 PM / URL

   This was one of those films where the little things made me laugh the most. The ways Wain tries to work in a word from each of the commandments into the opening shot of each story, how Paul Rudd’s seemingly trivial storyline starts taking over the movie, and, of course, Michael Ian Black’s brilliant cameo appearance.

2. Adam B. / 7 February 2008 / 5:29 AM / URL

   And don’t forget Diane Wiest.

3. Ali Arikan / 8 February 2008 / 12:55 AM / URL

   This is a terrible, terrible film, with no redeeming features whatsoever. None. I am surprised there are people, who actually like it. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose.