The Ten: First Reviews and a Release Date

David Wain's Ten Commandments spoof The Ten has been playing at Sundance Film Festival over the last couple of weeks, and the first few reviews are now in.

Fastest to the draw, as ever, are Variety where the reviewer is keen to stress the film's bad taste, (something, it seems, he generally enjoyed).

Only Christians with a very liberal sense of humor are likely to enjoy The Ten. Even lay viewers will need to be tolerant of gags as envelope-pushing as anything in Borat.

That said, The Ten doesn't go out of its way to blaspheme or otherwise poke fun at religion; it's simply that nothing is sacred, and the tastelessness is almost always funny first and nasty second -- which is more than can be said for most mainstream comedies.

The review also adds that Paul Rudd's character hosts the other sections, before starring in the final one himself. It also gives a fair bit of detail for each of the vignettes, which as they are on average less than 10 minutes each, may not leave much else for us to discover for ourselves (which some people like and some people don't). It's a common approach though. Scott Weinberg at Cinematical goes one further giving a one to ten rundown of each episode. He's less keen on the film overall, though.

Basically I'd call The Ten a "glass half full" experience. While some of the skits yield precisely zero in the laughs department (far as I'm concerned, anyway), a few of 'em hit me square in the funny bone and had me chuckling like a dork...Obviously not a mainstream-style comedy that'll appeal to a wide audience of braying knuckleheads (like, say, Meet the Fockers), The Ten feels a little like a "cult flick" waiting to happen.

Lastly, there are two reviews on the film at Ain't it Cool. The first includes a (blurred) picture of David Wain and some of the cast (including Rudd) and is fairly positive, but seems lukewarm in comparison with the second which actually uses the word "hilarious" four times in its single paragraph.

In other news, Yahoo has the news that THINKFilm has picked up the American distribution rights, and it looks likes this will reach cinemas this summer (2007).