Over the years, we’ve allowed ourselves to overlook the obvious modern parallels to African-American struggles for dignity, respect, and racial equality in other, more socially intolerant times. We tend to overlook how God’s chosen people, the Hebrew slaves of Egypt, long sought to put an end to their suffering under the yolk of pharaonic vanity and abuse how they yearned for freedom, and waited in vain for deliverance to the Promised Land, as prophesied in those same Old Testament passages. Politics aside, most God-fearing citizens have forgotten the sacrifices that went into the shaping of this gift of His promise for a happier earthly existence. To echo a well-worn phrase, “familiarity breeds contempt.” You may be under the assumption that everyone has advance knowledge of what Passover, the Exodus, and the Ten Commandments came to symbolize, what ostensibly led to their evolution, and what they entail for us TODAY as far as a spiritual guidepost for these fearful, stress-filled times. Oh, how humanity needs its “manna from heaven” moment! Knowledgeable readers, too, may recall the 2003 protests for and against a controversial ruling involving the imposition of a Ten Commandments monument at the state judicial building in Montgomery, Alabama - a veritable clash between the sacred and the secular.Ĭoncurrent with that story, the 2003 commemoration of the 40 th anniversary of the March on Washington brought to mind how much people of faith have taken this unique and inspiring symbol of God’s ancient law for granted.įlash forward to 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic, a scurrilous plague of Biblical proportions if ever there was one. Earlier in the week, Jews from around the world observed the solemnity of Passover, a time when Death passed over their households. Today is Good Friday, a day commemorated across the globe as one of tragedy and misfortune that, leading to eventual triumph and hope, culminates Sunday on a glorious Easter morning. It seems Freedom needed a lot of help to get started and still needs help to get it over the twin humps of Facebook and Amazon - we know what you watch, what you think, what you talk to other people about, who your friends are, what you read and listen to, where you shop and what you buy, where you live, eat and sleep.The giving of the Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston as Moses
Only Brynner is able to stitch together a character from these shopworn cliche-spouting metronomes passing for people.Īs the plagues of god pile up, we are told that the Hebrew exodus from Egypt was the first birth of Freedom in the world. All those special effects making it vital that the actual human beings on the set perform their parts as well as can be expected while on the clock so to speak - these effects are intricately timed. I expect that it is difficult to act in a movie that is almost 4 hours long and you are expected to bring to life a story that is more than 3,000 years old. Anne Baxter (Nefertiti) is the woman -in-the -middle. Yul Brynner (Rameses) is the put-out-actual-son-of Pharaoh-who-hates-his-pseudo-half-brother. None of the characters is especially intriguing: Charlton Heston (Moses) is just your ordinary born-Jewish-but-left-in-a-basket-in-the-Nile River- to-be-found-by-Pharaoh's daughter-and-made-into-a-prince-of-Egypt. Just as the special effects have taken prominence in this review, so too in the movie. When Moses and his wife to be are at the base of Mount Sinai, the Mount is a matte scene but to add depth to it, the smoke surrounding the peak was real, made by special smoke machines. Even less gaudy effects were multidimensional.
#TEN COMMANDMENTS MOVIE 2018 PLUS#
For example, the parting of the Red Sea involved a triple matte plus three dimensional sets and special sounds. They emphasized that most of the special effects were done in layers, that is, there was more than one element of special effects involved in each special effects scene. They brought along some video to explain how DeMille and his team did it - from Pillars of Fire to the parting of the Red Sea. Yes, as one critic said 60+ years ago in his review of this movie, we are put through DeMille again, but oh what a DeMille!Ĭraig Barron, a visual effects Oscar winner and Ben Burtt, a sound effects Oscar winner, introduced the movie at the TCM 2018 Festival. Watching TTC at the Grauman Chinese Theater, on a big screen and with a few hundred other people, the special effects are really special, especially since this was all done 60+ years ago without any CGI.
The Ten Commandments is to movies like those paintings of dogs playing cards is to art - I mean, how do those dogs do it? And that is what we all ask whenever we see this movie: how did they do it? The Ten Commandments or Put Through Demille Again
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