The Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston All Evening Musical Cinema Extraveganza

Which is to say, Charlton Heston kicked it, and my friends organized a commemorative viewing of one of his classic lead role films, The Ten Commandments. I’ve been told that, adjusted for inflation, this is the highest grossing film in history.

I think anyone who really likes watching movies should take some of these archaic films like 10C and watch one or two of them a year. They really do not make movies anything like this anymore. I mean, they make them much better. There is a very particular idiom to the acting in old Hollywood films. This is back in the day where complex internal character drama is not as important as the ability to deliver Grand and Sweeping Speeches. So you get a lot of those. These entertain me in much the same was as I am entertained by anime protagonists declaring that JUSTICE WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL. There is also this entire manner of speech the actors have in movies from this era that I think is part southern California accent and part diction training executed by a prim German headmistress with a whipping cane and horn-rimmed glasses. I spent the first hour trying to resolve this against the setting until my brain finally gave in to the cognitive dissonance.

Watching old movies usually makes me respect directors like Hitchcock who helped re-invent cinema, whether I like their movies or not. Watching The Ten Commandments made me respect Mel Brooks.

The fact that this movie is three and a half hours long might normally make it unwatchable for someone of my abbreviated attention span, except for two things:
1. It is so fricking long that I had time to take a brief nap in the middle
and 2. The popcorn-joke potential is huge

The best example of the latter was probably our biggest running callback gag, which basically went like this:

Pharaoh: “Rameses, you have falsely accused your brother.”
(Response): HEY! He can’t do that! It says so in the ten co–oh right.

These were followed distantly by my highly uncouth “hey what happened to my wallet” jokes, and remarks regarding Yul Brynner’s head.

The best part of the movie is probably the climactic ten commandments scene, where you can witness the very beginning of the Bruckheimerization of cinema props, when Moses hurls the stone tablets at MoobyThe Golden Calf, and it EXPLODES.