|
|
|
Entertainment CategoriesMovies
Music
Hollywood
|
Dogma
The Catholic League, which pressured cowardly Disney into backing out of releasing writer-director Kevin Smith's Dogma, apparently believes that God created everything in the universe except for a sense of humor. Of course, like most benighted censors, no one from the league even bothered to see the film. If they had, they would have been surprised to discover that the irreverent Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) has produced a film that is actually quite reverent when it comes to Catholic theology. Like Rabelais, the 16th-century Catholic monk who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is full of hilarious scatological humor, Smith worships God by embracing everything that He created, even the dirty stuff. At times he goes a bit too far (we perhaps could have gone without the shit-monster sequence), but behind every stupid joke and vulgarity is a deep intelligence and surprisingly powerful faith. Far from an attack on Catholic theology Dogma is Smith's attempt to salvage it from the people who have screwed it up for the last 2000 years or so. The film stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (paying Smith back for the help he gave them in getting their script for Good Will Hunting made) as two fallen angels who have found a loophole that will get them back into heaven but at the same time will destroy all of creation. Linda Fiorentino plays the skeptical Bethany Sloan, the unlikely messenger who reluctantly finds herself chosen to stop them. Along the way she gets some help from Rufus, the 13th Apostle (Chris Rock), left out of the Bible because it was written by "white guys," and Salma Hayek as a muse who takes credit for the 20 top-grossing movies of all time except Home Alone. Alanis Morissette also shows up in a funny and oddly touching cameo as God Himself -- er, Herself -- who loves doing handsprings and sniffing flowers. For added comic relief Smith and Jason Mewes show up once again as Silent Bob and Jay, as they have in every Smith movie so far. As funny as some of their conversations are, the device is beginning to a bit tired by this point. Indeed, if Smith's style has a weakness, it may be that like his friend Jay, he's a little too enamored with the sound of his own words. Although one could easily dismiss the lack of visual style in a film like Clerks, at this point, it wouldn't hurt if Smith acquired a little visual panache and let images do some of the talking for him. Instead of attacking a film like Dogma, groups like the Catholic League should celebrate the fact that someone actually has made an engaging movie about religion, something of a miracle for Hollywood these days. But who knows, if they can get around to forgiving Galileo, maybe in a few hundred years or so they'll actually watch this film and canonize Smith as the patron saint of seriously funny gross-out movies. -- Al Weisel |
