Word: film
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...giant screen. Thus the truest compliment to pay his movies--those tangy, nourishing stews of bent men and brave women, of comedy and melodrama, passion and grief--is to say they are every bit as beguiling as he is. And the only thing to say about his new film, All About My Mother, is that it is even better: the most mature and satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career. "Pedro is a great dancer," says Marisa Paredes, one of six superb actresses in Mother, "and this is his tango...
Smith calls the film "a bizarre mix of lowbrow jokes and highbrow concepts and then vice versa." Ain't it, though? He 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...
...September, the chunky young auteur faced a packed house at the Toronto Film Festival and smiled. "We're here tonight," Kevin Smith said, "and lightning has not 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...
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...
...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's 1988 parable of doubt purified into faith. Love Dogma or dismiss it, but don't condemn...