Word: dogmas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mixes poop and prophecy, scatology and eschatology; he crams his script with enough belly laughs for six Adam Sandler movies and enough citations of angelology and the Gnostic gospels to make a Jesuit's head split. This is a Shavian debate--Don Juan in New Jersey--with potty mouth. Dogma, recall, comes from the Greek word meaning "to think." And that's what Smith wants the viewer...
...struck the building. So I guess it's O.K. with the Lord." Smith, 29, had endured a rough six months, ever since the Catholic League, a lay group with 350,000 members and an intimidating letterhead, had pressured the Walt Disney Co. and its subsidiary Miramax Films to drop Dogma, Smith's rambunctious comedy about God, faith and a monster made of poop. Smith was able to make his movie freely, but if the protesters had had their way, he couldn't show it. To twist the famous bumper-sticker phrase, their karma ran over his Dogma...
Like the Synoptic Gospels, Dogma has a happy ending. Two, in fact. In the movie, God comes to earth, sets things right, then does a handstand. In the drama behind the film, Lions Gate, an independent distributor, opens Dogma this week after successful screenings at festivals in Cannes, Toronto and New York City. "Now we can put the rest of the stuff behind us and start fretting about the box office," Smith says. "I'm hoping that when people see the film, they'll say, 'Oh, it's not the movie that flips the bird at the church...
...pokes at Catholic doctrine--that God is a woman (Alanis Morissette), that the last descendant of Jesus (Linda Fiorentino) works in an abortion clinic, that there was a 13th Apostle who was black (Chris Rock)--Dogma is a tortured testament from a true believer. In an age when not only belief in God but belief itself brings a smirk to hip, jaded faces, this is a film out of time, the most devout movie in a modern setting since Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and a worthy successor to The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese...
Smith gets steamed when he thinks about the Dogma protests. "Every week I go to church, and sooner or later the priest makes a joke! How come a priest can mix religion and jokes, but if I do it, I'm anti-Catholic? That just burns my ass, because I'm out there trying to get people to think about God. I am working the good cause--and I'm anti-Catholic? I tithe! I don't bend down and tie my shoe when the basket comes around...