THE TEN

It's that one where Winona Ryder does it with a dummy.

Before I even watched The Ten, my friend said, "What is that, anyway?"

"It's that one where Winona Ryder does it with a dummy."

"Really?"

I had totally made that up based on a picture I'd seen in the paper. Winona was giving a ventriloquist's dummy a lusty look, and from the description of the movie, it didn't sound impossible. "Yep," I replied, just like I knew what I was talking about, but to be honest, I never expected to see Winona Ryder shagging a dummy in a motel room. That's exactly what happens in The Ten, along with every other raunchy, over-the-top scenario you can imagine involving drugs, sex, and potty humor.

Directed by David Wain, who brought us Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten does have its moments. It's just that you have to wade through all manner of lowbrow boy humor to get to them. Jeff Reigert (Paul Rudd) introduces a series of vignettes illustrating what happens when one breaks a Commandment... like your parachute doesn't open when you go skydiving, and you wind up lodged in the ground, and then people develop a sitcom around you, and your fiancee (Winona Ryder) leaves you for another man. Um, yeah, and then she leaves that man for a ventriloquist's dummy, which she steals, and stealing the dummy leads the ventriloquist to a life of destitution and drug use, so you see, breaking Commandments can lead to very bad things. As Jeff juggles a wife (Famke Janssen) and girlfriend (Jessica Alba) between vignettes, he proves that adultery doesn't pay. That's a Commandment too!

The Ten looks like the sort of movie that would be buckets of fun to make. You hang around with your friends, doubled over with laughter all day long, saying and doing the most outrageous things, and you actually get paid! Better yet, someone films the whole thing and releases it for the moviegoing public to see! This is a great deal for everyone behind the scenes, but for me, watching The Ten was a lot like being the only sober person in a room full of drunks. What's so funny? And even when you can see that something is kind of funny, geez, it's not that funny.

The "Making Of" featurette only reinforced my theory that the cast and crew were drunk on their own fun, and would more appropriately be called "Messing Around With a Camera on the Set of a Movie". The "Interview with David Wain, Paul Rudd, and Ken Marino" is more of the same as the boys crack themselves up on a couch. You know when you're, like, ten years old, and you start laughing at something dumb, and the more you laugh, the funnier everything gets? Well that's what happens with the words "love it" in this mind-numbing conversation. If I hadn't hated this movie so much, I might have been excited by the copious extras accompanying the DVD—audio commentary with David Wain, Ken Marino, and Paul Rudd, 55 long minutes of alternate takes and deleted scenes, ringtones, wallpaper, and an exclusive episode of "Wainy Days", none of which is better than something your local sketch comedy troupe would prepare.