Last night, because my wife was out of town, I saw the flick "10,000 BC." I made this sacrifice because I needed to know how bad it was, because every New Year's eve we host a bad movie party. Alas, it was too long for our party. It also lacked the je ne sais quoi that defines classic bad movies such as "Bo Derek's Tarzan" or "The Brain that Wouldn't Die."
The ethnic undertones are amazing. The whole point of the movie is that White guys can play Indians, complete with war paint. Omar Sharif's voice-over helps, by including such pseudo-Indian clichés as "many moons" and "white rain" (snow). The main plot starts with slavers riding horses stealing many of the band's people (including the heroine). Somehow, the good guys had never heard of horses before. The slavers have distinctly semitic noses and have guttural accents, so that some can think of them as Arabs and others can think of them as Jews. They are really bad guys, whose only positive side is that they betray each other a lot. Anyway, our hero (whose name seems to be "Delay," as in Tom) gets upset and goes off to seek & save his wife, the heroine. Since the latter was dragged off to the heavily-armed Big City, our hero has to organize an international coalition of the willing to invade Baghdad... I mean something that looks like Egypt. (The Egyptians look a bit Mayan to me, but I'm not an expert in anthropology the way the movie-makers are.) He is helped in this task by his kitty. The coalition is multiethnic, some White like our hero but most of them Black. No Hispanics, for some reason. It's never explained where in Africa (where this movie seems to take place) the White guys came from. Some of them wear costumes reminiscent of Monty Python's Holy Grail. Naturally enough, the good guys win by organizing the slaves to liberate themselves. (Central casting: get me a Moses!) One of the good guys is thrown off a pyramid and lands in a classic cruxifixion pose. When the goods guys throw one of the bad guys off, we can't see what pose he lands in. A star of David? a crescent? At the end, the Christian theme is maintained by having a resurrection. The main disappointment is that the head Egyptoid bad guy does not turn out not to be an alien. I'm sorry if I destroyed the movie for you if I gave away that last plot detail. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
