10,000 BC

My son Charles sent me the following commentary on 10,000 BC, which he prefers to think of as 10,000 BS:

"I'm hoping I'm writing this to a group of people who haven't yet wasted their time on the movie 10,000 BC. My opportunity to prevent you from having to waste money and time at that movie is the only good thing that will come from it. It was written by a 14-year old. I don't think I'm kidding either. This movie is based on a paper-thin plotline that attempts to exploit every old story and parable from the bible and old fairytales to the Michael Jackson "Black and White" video. There is a hot chick in this movie . . . , but by the end, I was so %#!*&& that the movie was still going on and that she was part of it that it wasn't even relevant. Relevance. There's a term that should have been defined to whoever decided to greenlight this cheesefest. At one point, the main guy befriends a saber-toothed tiger by saving him from a pit that was filling with water. He told the tiger not to eat him so it didn't. The guy fell in the pit because he was hunting for food for his friend who was dying. His friend had been hurt bad, and he dragged his friend on a stretcher across miles and miles of desert. This guy was in bad shape. He couldn't move or anything. Dude left his broken self alone in the middle of the wild and went hunting, fell in this hole, and weathered a night of torrential downpour in the hole. When he came back to the dying guy, the guy was perfect and had been doing recon around his campsite. No mention was ever made about the mortal wounds he had sustained earlier. I've named the style of story-telling that these jokers decided to use the "and then" narrative style. The entire story can be told with no back story in a completely A to B fashion and possibly in one long sentence. In this case, the sentence would involve misspelled words, it would lack all punctuation and capitalization, and it would be written in crayon. (Possibly a little doody would be on the back of the paper too.) e.g.: there's this guy and he knows this girl and they were kids before but now they're not and he has to kill these wooly mammoths but they're not wooly mammoths--there called something else and the guy's dad goes away and then later the guy kills the mammoth and he gets to take the girl and then he gives up the girl but he still wants her and then bad people come and take her away and then the guy says he is going to get her and takes his friends but there's a kid that wants to go and they say he can't but he goes anyways and they see him and then they all go and they meet a tiger and the tiger and the guy become friends and then they make friends with everyone in Africa and attack a really advanced civilization where the bad guys took the girl and then they make all the slaves fight too and there are more wooly mammoths and the girl gets hurt but then an old mammoth fixes her and they all say bye to their friends who are all from Africa and then they go back to their shitty houses on the top of a freezing ass mountain that was a terrible place to live anyway . . . and then I walked out of the movie. The only thing i took from that film was half of a diet coke. This movie makes such a laughable attempt at leeching the collective plots of Gladiator, The 13th Warrior, Ben Hur, 300, Jurassic Park, Stargate, and other otherwise decent-to-good films that I was surprised I never saw a cameo by Snoop Dogg or Shatner. The only thing that bothered me more than this movie was the creep show that had to be the crowd at the 9:55 PM showing of Horton Hears a Who. I've seen some weak movies this year (Fool's Gold) and I've seen some wonderfully awful films this year (Rambo) but this $%^& of a film should have gone straight to beta max. Not Blu-Ray, not DVD, not VHS...Beta Max. You can play the game when it comes out for TurboGrafx 16 later on this week. This movie would have actually been more understandable if Leslie Neilson had appeared at some point. To conclude, and I'll probably never, ever say this again, this movie might actually be more entertaining in a Broadway musical format."

"Sorry for the rant, but I had to get it off my chest."