10,000 B.C. YET AGAIN??

*(VISIT ME OVER AT NEWS BLAZE & ROTTEN TOMATOES)

10,000 B.C. -A NUMBSKULL-QUASI-CAVEMAN-GENRE-SPINOFF WITH A SPOT OF SPECTACLE by John G. Kays

‘It was important for me to not over do it National Geographic style.’ Steven Strait on his role as D`Leh.

‘Lana, zug-zug.’ Grunts from Ringo Starr in Caveman 1981.

It looks like the light of day is dimming on this Easter Sunday and I am still rubbernecking the entrails of 10,000 B.C.? I replay the clip of the freeing of the saber-tooth tiger by D`Leh for parallels. Daniel and the Lion perhaps? Curiously, why did Roland Emmerich spend two years on the CGI of 10,000 B.C.; is Tony-The-Tame-Tiger and Wimpy-Wally-the-Wooly-Mammoth all he could conjure in the laboratory? Gadzooks, these cartoons are not that scary! The chomping gargantuan ostriches look like Thanksgiving Day turkeys shot full steroids and hybrid nutrients. This stuck out like a sore thumb, but was pleasant pulp inserted in these meandering (meaningless) excursions through tropical jungles; is this yet another Mayan-laden Central America of yesteryear (see Apocalypto)?

Now close your eyes, my pretty! You are getting drowsy, you are falling into a deep, deep slumber. I command you to jump through the white canvas screen and now you are literally in the movie 10,000 B.C. The plot, if you can detect one, is packaged in a frame of three periods. The first third covers the Ice Age (shot in New Zealand) and just includes some military training (see 300) and then the big wooly mammoth hunt, where d`Leh snags a big bull and gets the sacred white spear. The second third is the Amazonian Tropical Rain Forest segment (shot in South Africa), or the Jungle Book period, and includes the capture of some tribes people of Yagahl by the “four-legged demons” (Tartar-like equestrian warriors that are teeming with evil). Especially noteworthy is the snagging of the princess Evolet (Camilla Belle) whose destiny is mostly prophesized as a ‘pivotal one’.

Alright, I hope you are still drowsy. Oh, I am certain of it after snacking on this pompous piece of pie. Your eyelids could use some close-pins, I do believe. Nonetheless, the third and final portion of B.C. is the Egyptian-Desert-Pyramid-period (shot in Namibia), where stupid slaves are building leviathan pyramids with beaucoup Wooly-Mammoths at the behest of some odd anteater-looking high priests with real long, spooky claws. I don`t have the slightest idea what they are up to, I just know that they are evil critters of the highest caliber, and they seem to mirror some of the tricks of the bad guys in the movie Matrix. Go ahead and see for yourself? Oh yea, the “four-legged demons” are employed by this goofy priest cult. The finale is a Coors Light Spartacus with mostly fake violence.This is the crescendo and resembles the ‘let my people go’ loop (from The Ten Commandments), and as such D`Leh amasses an army of down and outs and commences to bust up this greedy party of golden-calf-idle-worshippers. Evolet plays a key part in the liberation too, but I am not certain just how? I do know she comes back from the dead, yea, resurrects right before your eyes, when the shaman-medicine-woman, Ma-Ma from the Adam`s Family back at the homeland, channels some magic across the universe. I know it turns out happily ever after, but the scrapping is ‘but a light affair’, as Santa Anna once said in conjunction with the siege of the Alamo. Gee whiz, that is most of it.

Anachronisms flourish like moldy fungus in and on B.C., but thrill you with their audacity. “Roland and I never intended for 10,000 B.C. to be a documentary.” Words of Kloser again. No problem, comprende senor! A few fauxpas` for ya: pyramids in 10,000 years ago? Dreadlocks on hunter-gatherers? Proper English diction? Weren`t wooly mammoths already extinct at this time? Military sailboats on this fake river Nile? Did One Million Years B.C. have as bountiful of a basket of anachronisms? At least we got to see Raquel Welch in that rockin` Flintstones` bikini! Ostriches the size of giraffes snapping at the little tickie boy? Can D`Leh cross time zones by multiple millenniums too? It doesn`t matter actually, in fact, it makes it funnier. A narcissistic comment here is in order. I was hoping to make this piece inspired, logical, and even with smooth transitions, the way good writing is suppose to be (as Judyth Piazza, the editor here, would want it, I surmise), but B.C. is so stupid, banal, irrational, historically inaccurate, and lopsided, that I don`t think it would be possible for me to apply any writing virtues in its portrayal. This is a clever rationale for the imperfections of this writing, don`t you think?

“Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend.” Omar Sharif provides the narration that is overview for the gospel of the oppressed Yagahl, a tribe of Rastafarian cavemen with exquisite English diction. The screenplay is written by Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser; it would be comical to read it in a script format. They created their own theology for this Paleolithic culture of hunter-gatherers. I do not need to see all the specifics, but it looks like a zany kaleidoscope (from my tree nest) of classic fragments, ransacked from say Cecil B. Demille`s The Ten Commandments or Mel Gibson`s Apocalypto, arbitrarily glued together into a tripping, fanciful collage of a B movie. I did not see Ice Age but it has been suggested that some of this was chunked in the mix as well. My own spot of gray matter senses some lifts from Jungle Book; they can be seen through the shop window, if you look hard enough.

I will be brief on the acting and music. Steven Strait, Camille Belle, and Cliff Curtis are manikins, crash test dummies for this empty caveman genre spectacle. They might as well have just twiddled their thumbs on the sets, but not that they didn`t do just that. The acting is easy to describe: it`s a polar bear in a snow storm, white on rice, lifeless bodies that phone it in. The music score by Harald Kloser contains misplaced notes, out of sync fanfares, obnoxious and intrusive; the football is greasy and squirts out of his hands, yea, he fumbles on the twenty yard line and the audience grabs for their earplugs but can not find them in the nick of time. Even Red Skelton himself is a better composer than that Kloser dude!

“Did I miss something?”, I asked myself as I exited the theater. I scratched my head in befuddlement as I pondered the convoluted theology that was generated by the flickering footage. When I got home I thumbed through the Bhagavad Gita for clues to fathom Emmerich`s vision. The Bhagavad Gita was created in 10,000 B.C. so it must contain keys to the universal understanding of say, the shaman-medicine-woman (Ma-Ma) draped in bone-beads who saw it all. I knew that D`Leh (Steven Strait) was a prophet and savior for the indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes seeking freedom from the bondage of the priest cult now ruling over the ‘new pyramid culture’. I fancied D`Leh as a Lord Krishna dictating a new philosophy to his troubled people. The blessed Lord Krishna said: “Fire, light, day, the moon`s brightness, the six months of the north-turning sun: dying then, men who are free go to absolute freedom.” Eureka, I was starting to see it now!

Surely there is something in 2001 A Space Odyssey that explains the events that unfold randomly on the screen? There is a beginning, middle, and end to both films so maybe that is the connection. Then I rehashed the tenets of eHarmony, a club that I have just joined, to divine an intersection; maybe D`Leh and the blue-eyed Evolet (Camille Belle) with the spiffy dreadlocks had met on eHarmony? Twenty-seven levels of compatibility would explain the harmonics between the two, wouldn`t it? Banality and boredom set in, then ultimately despair. I thumbed through the images again. Desperately, I turned the leafs of the Old Testament for harbingers. Icelandic legend anyone? A petrified scrap from the blind poet Homer? Come On! Reveal your secrets unto me, oh Karnack The Magnificent?

Why yet another dry review of an obvious cut-out-bin toss off, that will never see the light of day for even another nanosecond, much less a handful of millenniums? For one thing I have the flu currently and am trying to amuse myself until I recover (I will return to a more serious project in short order). Another reason is that readers love to witness shark-jawed critics rip the fatty flesh away from bone on such a paltry piece of pseudo-prehistoric fluff. B.C. is a plump partridge (probably in a pear tree) of caveman days` hocus-pocus; i.e. ripe meat for the carrion crow (film critics). The reader himself likes to join in on the act, yea, this is much appreciated audience participation; then they too can tear off a slab of chi kabob and devour it ritually, then guffaw defiantly at its .09 rating on the Rotten Tomatoes` Tomatometer. This may account for my perusal of all coverage of said film and the actual vacating of my condo to visit my local cinema for a viewing of 10,000 B.C., in person. The irony here is that this film is wracking up big receipts and the critics are receiving more reads, as dumb-down amateurs jawbone `bout the water cooler. Bravo! Everyone comes out a winner! That is cool, my fair weathered friends! B.C. is an oddity preserved in a bottle, a relic of P.T. Barnum that folk can Wow! over; it is a Hindenburg, a Tiny Tim, a Jumbo the Elephant that brushes us with a feather unmercifully. Have you seen Aretha Franklin lately? She fits in (but it is a tight fit) somewhere here, don`t you think?

10,000 B.C. The Legend. The Battle. The First Hero. Huh? This is the cornball slogan that is printed on the arcade poster that you stare at dumbly (that word is coming up a lot) as you enter your favorite local suburban multiplex, in every city known to man, in our great big country. Oh yea, Lost In Time. Duh! 108 minutes of Cheese Whiz and Ritz Crackers? Let`s try to snuff out the light here before a CGI herd of mastodons gets back up and starts charging us! Please bring closure to this thing, Mister John! Before you know it I`ll be pushing up old goat daisies! What we have here really, is a hefty bale of plastic, Pleistocene cotton candy, that gives you a whopper of a stomach ach as you wander through the Neanderthal ‘mall of life’. 10,000 B.C. is the new 2001 A Space Odyssey, April Fools, you gullible buffoon!