Re-Viewing: “Dogma” (1999)

Hi there. When I Re-View movies I do just that, I watch them again. Catching things I missed the first time, and wondering why i did or didn’t like that movie as much as I did.

“Dogma” (1999)

Directed and written by Kevin Smith. This movie is famous for featuring a literal “shit demon”.

Kevin Smith is, by his own admission, not so much a director as a writer who films his own writings. And nowhere is this more obvious than in “Dogma”.

”Dogma” was, and still is, my favorite of Smith’s movies. Even though it is really an epic struggle of evangelical proporiortions, it still feels like Smith on even a macroscopic plot level.

It goes like this: Two outcast angels (Matt Damon pre-“Bourne” and Ben Affleck pre-“Armageddon”. Both Pre-“Good Will Hunting”) Have found a loophole in the catholic dogma which allows them to return to heaven contrary to Gods commands. Only problem is that if God is proven fallible, the entirety of existensce is erased. This all sounds much better when Alan Rickman explains it in the movie.

Thus, the forces of heaven send the last relative of Jesus Christ, played by Linda Fiorentino out to stop them. She is aided by the thirtheenth apostle (Chris Rock) who is here to inform the world that Jesus was black, a muse (Selma Hayek) who is here to act against the misogyny in the bible, plus Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith himself) who are there because … well, they provide good laughs.

This all has a very high potential for action. But this is a comedy, and it ends up in a lot of talking. A whole lot of talking.

I first saw “Dogma” on TV late at night a handful of years ago, when I was in a slightly more impressionable age. And I dropped in about halfway through, around the point-of-no-return. This is were the dialogues are actually the most fitting and grapping. In fact I think that had the dialogue been trimmed down in the rest of the film and preserved around this point, the film might have had a more universal appeal. Well, if look past all the religious uproar it caused.

But my point is that there is a “great movie” in “Dogma”, with lots of dialogue on top, and a lot of “great dialogues” that other movies would kill to have. But this is not really something that bothers me on the personal level, because the dialogue (the whole lot of it) is good and is mostly delivered by people who take scene-chewing delight in it, the most fun to watch is the aforementioned Alan Rickman.

But even today Dogma stands as a movie that is a marriage of a pseudo-intellectual series of arguments against organized religion (catholicism taking the worst of it) and a dirty, but funny comedy. And it doesn’t ever delude itself into being anything else. It works at what it sets out to do – give us a good time, something to think about, and maybe a voice for some things that we didn’t know we wanted to say.

Bonus Points: This movie features Jason Lee as the demon Azrael. The role which got him cast as the villain Syndrome in Pixar’s “The Incredibles”.

Furthermore Kevin Smith’s latest film “Cop Out” (formerly “A Couple of Dicks”) has just premiered in the United States. It stars Bruce Willis who starred as John McClane opposite Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in “Die Hard” back in the mythical year of 1989.