...or "Bad-Ass Moses".
Did anyone catch the remake of "The Ten Commandments"on ABC-TV over the past two nights? I did. I'm regretting the time that I spent planted in front of the TV. I could have been doing far more productive things, like doing dishes, building an armoire, making a sandwich, having naughty-bad fun with the wife, etc., etc., etc. So, whether you want it or not, you're getting the "Movie According To Nilo" show today. My apologies to you if you really dug the show...
The Ten Commandments - Two Thumbs Down.
Have you ever fallen victim to a movie that looked pretty good on the commercial, and then you go see it, only to discover that the only 90 seconds of decent footage in the entire film was the commercial?
This is pretty much the case. I enjoyed the scene where Pharoah asks Moses why he should grant freedom to the slaves, and Moses boldly replies "Because God commands it!" I was thinking the whole movie might be of that same caliber. Wrongo.
The movie starts out with an epileptic crazy man prophet sort of fellow that is summoned to interpret a rather disturbing dream of the old Pharoah. He whines like he really, really needs to go to the bathroom, gives his prophetic warning concerning a slave child that will be raised as a prince of Egypt, and then falls over and looks like he's getting jiggy wit'da floor.
In the Cecil B. DeMille version (hereafter referred to as the "CBD" version), Moses doesn't find out about his heritage until he's a grown man (if my memory serves me right). In the stupid-ass version (hereafter referred to as the "SA" version), he is taken as a young child to the ghetto, and introduced to his family. (Hey Moses, these scraggly, stinky people with no fashion sense are your birth family! Don't worry though, you can still live in the palace...)
In the CBD version, Moses and Ramses are raised as brothers. In the SA version, Moses is raised with some Egyptian kid named "Menerith", who later grows up to serve Ramses in his royal court. Menerith has no problem with the fact that Moses comes from slave stock, and years later, brings his son to the ghetto to meet the bedraggled prophet. Son, this is a great man... Ah Menerith, don't you have a plane to catch? Flight 813, maybe?
This version of the Ten Commandments is also infatuated with blood, gore and mindless killing, perpetuating some idiotic notion that the entire pre-renaissance world was just a bloodbath with a few cool buildings, some gnarly costumes here and there, and extremely bad hygiene. Fact shows that many highly civilized peoples have populated the earth in millenia past.
Perhaps the most offensive thing about the show (other than the gross inaccuracies, and very liberal usage of "creative license") was the way they portrayed the man Moses. He continually looked as though he either had a migraine or was constipated. When God "whispered", Moses clutched his head as though the Almighty was standing next to him screaming into a megaphone. Also, the lack of confidence in God, himself and his destiny was another brain-child of Hollywood, who - in the name of "passion" - cuts great and inspirational figures down to the lowest possible denominator, and gives us reason to not only be uninspired, but rather comfortable in our complacency.
Think about it: Moses was educated in the royal courts of Egypt. According to the Bible, The Lord "spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exodus 33:11), and if you read through chapters 3 and 4 of Exodus, the Lord spells things out rather succinctly to Moses, and how events are going to unfold. Contrast this to the SA version, where Moses can't figure out his own identity, let alone God's. Our migraine suffering bedraggled prophet keeps trying to second guess himself and God, wondering what's going to happen next. I'd wager that to be instructed by the Creator of the universe would purge you of any doubt or misgiving... but hey, that's just me.
Again, Yay Charlton Heston, Boo to the new show.
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