Making a comedy compilation based on the Ten Commandments, is a wonderful idea. Actually pulling it off, is much tougher. The comedy group The State does an okay job with it in The Ten. Some of the skits are brilliant and had me laughing throughout, some of the other skits, not so much. But if you're a fan of offbeat comedies, you should check out the film for yourself.

The film suffers from constantly returning to a narrator character in the form of the usually funny Paul Rudd. He lives in some sort of black void with two huge stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. Between each story, we're taken back to him and the continuing story of him cheating on his wife, played by a game Famke Janssen. But it's not funny, and the film keeps returning there, dragging the film down instead of keeping a good rhythm. They should have found a better way to transition between the stories.

I'd say six-and-a-half of the stories are pretty funny. I found three of them to be particularly good. In thou shall not worship false idols: Adam Brody jumps out of an airplane without a parachute, he survives but is stuck up to his chest in the ground, if he's moved, he'll die. He becomes a celebrity for a short while, even getting his own sitcom. The whole idea of being famous for being stuck in the ground, and the image of Brody with his foot sticking awkwardly out of the ground near his head, is consistently funny.

In Thou Shall not take the Lord's name in vain: Gretchen Mol, who even knew she could be funny, plays a Librarian who takes an extended trip to Mexico, where she falls in love with the resurrected Jesus. She has a torrid love affair with him, repeatedly calling out his name, while they're having sex. Jesus is played by the always cool Justin Theroux. In Keep the Sabbath sacred: A guy refuses to go to church, instead comes up with the idea of Naked Sundays. His idea is so beloved, his house is soon full of guys skipping church to frolic naked while listening to the sultry sounds of Roberta Flack. The skit ends with a hilarious song about nakedness.

There's some decent stuff with Winona Ryder falling in love with a ventriloquist dummy. A semi funny bit about the usually deadly, serious Liev Schreiber, coveting his neighbors cat-scan machines, until both their houses are full of them. And some really lame skits about a doctor killing somebody on a goof and then getting repeatedly prison raped. The film is all over the place and with some of the stories, they're really stretching for any relevance to the actual Commandments.

The Ten has an amazing cast; and everybody throws themselves into these goofy roles full throttle. But the writing is where the film suffers, sometimes the jokes hit a home run, but a lot more of them strike out. I thought that The State's previous film: Wet Hot American Summer, was a much better film, better told and more consistently funny. If you haven't seen that film, I suggest it instead. If you've seen it, you could do worse than The Ten, but hopefully they do a lot better with their next film.

I don't claim to be a huge David Lynch fan. I've really enjoyed some of his films; Elephant Man, Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet in particular. I remember seeing Lost Highway in the theater about 10 years ago, when I was really starting to get into cinema, and I was absolutely loving the film, the style and the weirdness was perfect, until it came to the very end and the film left no explanation for what had just happened. I felt betrayed. I'd never seen a film where there wasn't a wrap-up of sorts. I don't think I've seen it since, but I vividly remember many scenes from the film, which is a testament to his filmmaking abilities. It's about time for a re-watch.

I saw Mulholland Dr. a few years later and even though it was a stranger film than Lost Highway, making even less sense, I came out of there loving it, because I understood Lynch's work better and could appreciate abstract cinema more.

Going into Inland Empire I knew it would be a challenge to make it through. Three hours of any film is a long time, you've really got to earn it to make a film that long. Three hours of David Lynch shooting on DV was going to be even tougher.

I sat through the first 10 minutes with my jaw dropped in disbelief. There were people with blurred heads talking about god-knows-what, a scary looking couple speaking in Polish I think, then a weird sitcom-like-show with people sitting around in giant rabbit head's while a laugh-track goes off in the background. Finally we get to Laura Dern's character and it started to make a little bit of sense.

She's an actress, whose gotten a role in a film with a strange history. Apparently, they tried to make it before, but both the lead actors died before it could be finished. Justin Theroux is Dern's costar, he's notorious for hooking up with the actresses he works with. Dern's husband, warns him that he'll kill him if they sleep together. Which of course they do. I was starting to get into the film, it was definitely Lynch, but I could make sense of it and the story was starting to intrigue me.

But then about 80 minutes into the film it started to get weird again. I had no clue who anybody was, or what the hell they were talking about. There was some cool imagery, but you couldn't piece it together in any logical way. That's when I started fast-forwarding through the film, I knew I couldn't put up with it for another two hours. And it made about as much sense in fast-motion as it did at normal speed. I kept hoping it would go back to the story that I was getting into, but from what I could tell it never really did.

Only David Lynch could get me to write this much, without even sitting through his whole film. He's an extremely unique talent. Way out there beyond anybody else's work that I've seen. I'm sure there are some film artists, working on the fringes, that begin to match his weirdness, but they don't get distribution.

I'll be there for his next film, but I hope it's more along the lines of Mulholland Dr. or Blue Velvet, weird, but not completely illogical.