Dogma

Blah, blah, fuck, blah, fuck, blah. Look at me: I just wrote a Kevin Smith movie.

Actually, Smith's latest "Dogma" is about two hours and fifteen minutes longer than that, and it doesn't have the high production values that my web site has, but you get the idea.

"Dogma" is the story of second-tier characters of the Bible and Catholic doctrine subjected to a comic book geek's love for minutiae. It's a tedious exercise in mental masturbation by a guy who loves hearing himself talk, made by an industry with so few new ideas that they're afraid to edit him. The movie tries real hard to be funny, but unless piles of talking poop and the same joke ad nauseum is your idea of hilarious, you'll be sadly disappointed. And, if there is a message, it's completely lost under the lame jokes, clunky plotting, and non-stop yammering.

Oh, sure, at the beginning there is a brief intro where the producers explain that they aren't trying to make a point, just entertain. But that's a copout and a huge crock of shit. It's a pussy way of trying to get off the hook. That's like me saying, the next thing I do will mean nothing, and then going and beating the shit out of those losers at the Ralston Chevron.

Ben "I still can't act" Affuck and Matt "My friend can't act" Damon are two fallen angels who desperately want to get back into heaven. God won't ask them back, so they need to find a loophole in religious doctrine. They find it in Catholicism, because a church in New Jersey is offering plenary indulgence, a means for absolving people of all punishment due them because of their sins. In other words, if Damon and Affuck enter the church as mortals, they will be absolved of any punishment like purgatory or hell, and when they die, they'll go straight into heaven.

If they get back into heaven, that will prove God is fallible, which means everything is in question and the world, His creation, will cease to exist. God's creatures want to stop Affuck and Damon, while a bitter devil (Jason "I'm whiny" Lee) wants to help them. The Voice of God (Alan Rickman) enlists Linda Fiorentino to help because she is a descendant of Jesus who was born about 300 years ago (according to the movie's timeline). What follows is a slow-motion road movie where everyone is after the two boys. But, they aren't in any hurry. The story is moved forward with clunky, improbable plotting and the characters always have time to talk and talk and talk. Finally, they all reach New Jersey, there is bloodshed and strife, and at the last minute, God (Alanis Morissette) steps in because Fiorentino finds her.

"Dogma" looks and sounds like shit. It's like Smith was so impressed with his ideas that he didn't even bother trying to make the flick look good The special effects are cheesier than a sci-fi series on the WB, the editing sucks big hairy moose tits. The action is static. All anyone does is sit or stand and talk. Some scenes are so God-damn grainy they look like they were shot on eight millimeter film. And the soundtrack is really annoying. One minute it's cliché classical music, next it's this weepy string music, then it's some really annoying bubble-gum pop. And it's all cranked up louder than my neighbor's shitty Queensryche records.

The whole production felt like some lofty film school project . Some fuck was so impressed with the shit he thought up that he wrote a script where a bunch of people say it to each other. But, he was so in love with himself that he paid no attention to structure, character or setting. He just kept moving people around while they continue to spout his mental masturbation.

Under Smith's amateur-hour skills, the acting stinks to high heaven. It's better than the local "special" school Christmas musical production "Merry Christmas, Grandpa," but only because nobody shit his pants like the retards did. There are only two places where a frat fuck with no personality like Ben Affuck can succeed. One is the business world, the other is Hollywood. This dumb chimp reads his lines, but not for one minute did I believe he was doing anything more than reading his lines and working his jaw muscles. Putting him beside his butt-buddy Matt Damon makes his lack of ability obvious. I mean, Damon is no Laurence Olivier. Fuck, the asshole's no Henry Winkler, but he acts circles around Affuck.

Chris Rock, who normally can make me laugh so hard that shit comes out my navel is just annoying. The guy has one speed and it's angry screeching. It wears thin pretty fucking fast. Jason Lee proves once again that he should be selling Buicks and not acting thanks to his lifeless, personality-challenged performance as a devil with these fake-looking horns on his head. I saw more realistic horns on kids at Halloween, and how fucking hard would it have been to get that right? At least his seersucker suit is nice.

Salma Hayek makes a cameo as a stripper. And that's a fucking joke because we don't see her tits. She's too big a star to show us those ripe melons, so why have her play a stripper? Alanis Morissette makes a cameo as God and she is the second character who doesn't speak but mimes (Kevin Smith, as Silent Bob, is the first, and, man, can that guy not act). How many fucking pantomimes does a movie need? I thought there was a federal regulation about this. One isn't cute or funny, but two is going back to an already dry well. Really, what's the fucking point of "Silent Bob?" Isn't he a gag whose comedic possibilities ran out about eight minutes into that pile of shit "Mallrats?" Yes.

Only Alan Rickman and Linda Fiorentino come out all right. Rickman plays the voice of God with the worn-out sarcasm that I usually only see when English people are trying to talk down to Americans. It's appropriate, then, that the guy's a Brit. Fiorentino ain't great, but she gamely does all the stupid shit that Smith's script asks from her, and she doesn't whine. (I remember when she was really hot looking, but now she looks like a beat-up soccer mom slut.)

All these actors are deployed in a plot that's the wet dream of a geek whose memorized the bible. Smith is not a man who should be making huge theological statements, and yet the prick is gonna try. What he wants to say is people shouldn't get so wrapped up in the details of religion... like he did with this tedious hairball.

"Dogma" sets its tone in Scene One when Damon feeds a nun a crock of shit and we as an audience are supposed to say, "Boy, them Catholic nuns sure are stupid." For Christ's fuck, Kevin Smith has the balls to assume that he thought of all this shit before anyone else. I'm sure every nun and priest asked themselves the same questions a hundred times when they were jerking off in the seminary or convent.

Besides being a piss-poor director, Smith's like the most annoying Star Trek freak in the world; he's taken giddy pleasure that he's found discrepancies that the writers didn't. Jeepers, who would've thought a 2000 page book written by hundreds of people would have some consistency problems? And who the fuck cares? It didn't occur to him to ask his priest of the Vatican about them and save us all the nerdy gloating.

The church doesn't dwell on this shit anymore. They've moved beyond it, so why does Smith think he can tweak them by bringing it up? And how the fuck is he going to make a big statement about the nature of faith by getting so fucking absorbed by little details? He doesn't.

Neither does he scandalize the Catholic Church. So, the priests should get their vespers out of their asses and stop protesting. If someone really wanted to scandalize the church, they would make a movie that claims the communal wine is made from the blood of altar boys the priests fucked to death.

Why should we have to spend two hours while people talk and talk and talk about all this shit? I mean, as snappy as Smith's dialog is, and no matter how many "fucks" it has in it, he's just regurgitating crap from the bible, mixed with comic-book-geek pop culture references . The movie is based on such archaic nonsense that Smith has to spend the whole damn movie explaining why we're supposed to care, or what the fuck people are doing. Talk, talk, talk. That's why the movie is two hours and 15 minutes long. Easily 45 minutes too much.

Plus, it's confusing. Okay, I got a small brain that's been shrunk even further through the avid consumption of beer, but in the second half of this movie I got completely and totally lost. Yap, yap, yap, everyone tried to explain what was going on, but I had no fucking clue why the actors were doing the shit they were doing. And, the more I got lost, the less I cared. So, I was left with a shitty-looking, static motion picture.

My final beef is a pretty big one. At the end of "Dogma," Morissette as God sees all the destruction and death these angels have caused in Red Bank, New Jersey. So, Smith has her blink her eyes and everything is back to normal. Fuck you, Kevin Smith! Your God gives a shit about hundreds of people in New Jersey but doesn't reverse the Holocaust or the genocides in Africa? You fucking presumptuous cocksucker.

Two fingers for "Dogma." Go back to bed, Kevin Smith, and jerk your little prick, not your mind.