The Ten

I enjoy the happy coincidences in life. Take for example my desire to talk about The Ten, which recently came out on DVD. It just so happens that Mormon church president Gordon Hinckley died at the ripe old age of 97 the exact same weekend I watched the movie. Awesome! A movie about the big whammies in religion and the big whammy of what is marginally a religion happening across my radar at the same time? Religious folk would use the term providence, but things like that require ugly abstract ideas like faith. Yuck, how messy. But a biblical satire and a dead old man and his Martian beliefs, well, that's just a charming stroke of good timing...

As you can see, The Ten gives stories inspired by those core tenets, but don't expect lessons. If anything, the film pokes fun at the rules and shows that breaking them tends to be as deeply harrowing as upholding them. I wasn't too fond of the narrative structure, which was too much like a high school play, but the overlapping and reoccurring characters made the different tales more interesting. Also, as ridiculous as some of the situations were, they were played very matter-of-fact, making them even better.

Of course, it could have been The Fifteen.