Going On 10 Years

I've mentioned Sturgeon's Law before -- "Ninety percent of everything is crap" -- But P.T. Barnum's century and a half maxim is as true as the day it was pronounced" "There is a sucker born every minute." Wish that it were not so.

I want to know why the studio execs in Hollywood so gleefully ensure that those "laws" stay more than theory. Can they honestly not tell the difference between good and bad? Do films look much better in script form and then get turned into gelatinous garbage during the actual filmmaking process.

Who deserves the blame? Should blame be handed out equally?

Why is there not enough diligence to ensure that more Batman Begins are made and fewer Pathfinders or 10,000 B.C.s?

Can they honestly not tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one? Or, do they have such little concern about the progress of humanity that they continue to search for the easy buck among the least common denominator?

I probably make the mistake of assuming the suits in tinsel town actually give a damn about movies. But to most of them, movies are a business, not an art.

I'm convinced something like No Country for Old Men gets the go-ahead because the studios need movies to tank to claim them as tax write-offs. Spend/lose money to make money. Not saying they expected a movie like No Country to tank, mind you, just that movies like that tend to make less.

For instance, No Country for Old Men, which debuted on DVD this past Tuesday, looks like it made somewhere close to $70 million at the box office. In its opening weekend, 10,000 B.C., which shouldn't even be considered the same medium as No Country, pulled in something like $35 million. It took No Country months to claw up to almost $70 million.

It's not right. Not right at all.

Then again, Will Ferrell's latest is tanking. Tanking. Ha.

I just don't get it. I don't get why people continue to see bad films. Which leads us to 10,000 B.C.

I'm not sure why anyone thought this was a good idea to begin with. I can only assume it was greenlit because it was written by Roland Emmerich, the man behind such luminescent films as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, and The Patriot.

None of those movies is any good, but they all have enough spectacle that they drew in the crowds like flies to a fresh carcass.

Why were they bad, I mean, aside from general preposterousness? Actually, the preposterousness is enough.

In Independence Day, for instance, I could never get past the fact that they upload a virus written on a human computer into the system of an alien spaceship. I guess perhaps I'm unaware that computing laws and languages are universal, being based on numbers and all, and that the specific syntax is irrelevant.

Uh huh.

And there's the speech given by POTUS Bill Pullman. "Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!" And then he gets into a fighter jet and takes it to those alien bastards. Yeah, right. Imagine that in real life. Would you really want W. strapping himself into an F-18 and going off to fight the alien menace? Or Hillary, for that matter?

Okay, yeah, that actually sounds appealing. Strap him in and point him toward Mars. Tell him the terrorists are holed up behind the red planet and that his plane has been adapted to fly in space.

The Day After Tomorrow, much like the computer virus in Independence Day, has one scene that's so damn silly, it almost makes the rest of the movie make sense.

In the scene, Jake Gyllenhaal's character has gone out into a frozen NYC, climbed aboard a tanker ship that's floated inland, and searched for antibiotics for Emmy Rossum, his girlfriend-to-be.

As he races back to the library, he's being chased by a wave of what looks for all the world like sentient cold air. That's right, the cold air is nipping at his heals and he gets to the room everyone is holed up in just in time!

Emmerich, who is German, also has a thing for the French. In Godzilla, he has some crack French team lead by Jean Reno (of course), running around covertly trying to bring down the monster. They might even have a hand in saving the day, though I can't really remember. I've tried to block that whole experience out of my mind.

With The Patriot, one of Mel Gibson's trusted companions is a Frenchman. I'm aware of the French's contribution to the American Revolution, sure, but this film . . . would you want it standing as a cinematic symbol of our country's fight for independence? It's melodramatic crap of the highest magnitude. Plus, the two main characters are played by Australians (Gibson grew up there, even if he's an American citizen; the other being the late Heath Ledger prior to his realizing he didn't want to contribute to cinematic fare such as this).

Emmerich makes big, dumb, bombastic films, and because they always make money, they perpetuate the belief in Hollywood that as long as there is adequate spectacle, the masses will roll out and the dollars will flow.

Emmerich also made Universal Solider -- the film where Dolph Lundgren makes himself a necklace of ears and gets beaten up by Jean Claude Van Damme -- and Stargate.

Stargate I actually enjoyed at the time. The movie, mind you, not the low-rate, long-running, craptacular television series. The movie isn't without its moments of cheese, but on the whole, I kinda liked it.

I mention Stargate for one because it's the only movie of Emmerich's I think is worth a damn, and for another, it has a strange sort of connection to 10,000 B.C. (they both have to do with the pyramids). In fact, by the time we get to the pyramids in 10,000 B.C., I think Emmerich is subtly trying to get you to think of the alien connection established in Stargate.

Giving him that, however, would lend 10,000 B.C. an air of coolness it does not deserve. Nothing in 10,000 B.C. should be considered "cool."

Pre History

D'leh and his people live up in the north. Geographically speaking, past one of the mountain ranges in Asia as they end up in what will become Egypt (as evidenced by the creation of the pyramids). His people are hunters. Their prey is the wooly mammoth.

They run about in furs, all have righteous dreads and pretty, white teeth. They paint themselves with colored mud and they listen to the wisdom of the old woman in the village because she can talk to the spirits.

One day, a couple of the hunters find a blue-eyed girl and bring her back to the village. The old woman prophesizes then that the girl will be the focus of great change for their people and that she will be wed to a hero or the tribe who'll deliver them from living in the freaking snow and hunting mastodons.

D'leh grows up to become that guy, sorta. He lies about killing the mastodon and gives the ceremonial white spear back to his adopted father (yeah, I could explain all that better, but I'd rather not).

After he gives up the girl for honor, well, dishonor, "barbarians" on horses show up, raid the village and take off with most the warriors and Evolet (Camilla Belle). She's the blue-eyed girl. D'leh, his step-dad TicTic (Cliff Curtis) and one of the other warriors in the tribe who somehow didn't get captured go after them.

The pursuit leads them across a mountain range, through a jungle filled with giant vulture/ostrich monsters and into the dessert where they find people D'leh's father encountered after leaving the village many years before.

Somewhere in there, D'leh makes friends with a saber-tooth tiger and figures out that in fact, he isn't a coward, but a hero. Duh. Once he gets that figured out, leading a slave uprising seems easy. Then again, he's just doing it to get the girl back.

Holy hell 10,000 B.C. is stupid. I can't think of a single thing nice to say about it. I'd rather they have tried to make this a fantasy flick of some kind than pass it off as a "historical epic." The only thing epic about the movie is its audacity to take itself seriously.

The "trek" makes no sense. They travel from the north to Eqypt? On foot. In a matter of weeks. Are you kidding me? Some dude is going to ride a horse across say, the Himalayas, to collect slaves to build the pyramids? Dammit, man, at least try to make the story make some sense.

I felt bad for the actors. It's like they were trapped in a George Lucas movie. I can just imagine Cliff Curtis, who was pretty good in Sunshine, standing there thinking, "My character's name is Tic Tic? I go from Die Hard to Tic Tic? I'm getting a new agent."

Camilla Belle doesn't have much to do put look pretty in her bright blue contacts and play the damsel in distress. There's certainly no "empowered woman" in her part, though she does manage to stab a few people.

I've never heard of the lead, Steven Strait, though I guess he has a part in the upcoming Stop Loss. Not a big part. He's not what I'd call "good" in the role. Though, again, he's not given a lot to work with. He sure doesn't strike me as the prototypical prehistoric hero.

And then there's the whole racist thing. A white guy comes out of the great snowy north to lead the desert people to overthrow their false god and oppressor. The desert people are, of course, black, and apparently incapable of doing this without his leadership.

In. Sane.

What in the holy hell was Emmerich smoking when he wrote this? Did he pack his nasal cavities with peyote? Did he smoke up a big vat of weed or masticate copious amounts of shrooms?

The whole "story" of 10,000 B.C. comes off like something a fourth-grader would write while ignoring a lecture in his history class. Then again, that's an insult to the fourth-grader.

Movies can be big and good. It is possible. It has been done, and done recently. It's just there are so precious few of them, and no one seems to understand what separates the good from the dumb. Were that Syd Field's paradigm produced a winner every time...

In the end, I'm ashamed I watched 10,000 B.C., even in the interest of being able to dissuade others from doing the same.

What is the greater good? Abstinence or giving fair warning? I'm afraid in the end, I'd be better off just not going. After all, every dollar counts against us.

Until next week when I actually get to review what looks like a Mad Max throwback flick (Doomsday) and a highly regarded foreign flick, 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days.

Out.