Issue #03/84, February 29 - March 10, 2000 
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The Academy Award nominations are in, with the only remotely interesting pick being South Park’s "Blame Canada" for Best Original Song. It will of course lose out to Phil Collins, or someone equally despicable--which is as it should be. Because if a song like that (or worse, one of the film’s less sophisticated numbers--the brilliantly lowbrow "Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker!" for example) were actually to win, the whole damn Oscar institution might thereby reclaim some shred of its original relevance (recall that way back when, Citizen Kane was--quite rightly--NOT recognized as Best Picture).
Unlike notorious surrogate Best Screenplay winners in recent years such as Pulp Fiction and Fargo, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was not the year’s best film. It is precisely for its songs that the movie deserves to be recognized. And if it were so recognized, even inveterate cranks like me would have to acknowledge grudgingly that Oscar had gotten something exactly right. Minor category or not, such an admission would be the mental equivalent of passing a golf ball-sized kidney stone. While frying on speed for like, day four out of the last five. Nobody wants that--at least not the fucking kidney stone.
Meanwhile, it’s almost March here in Moscow, and we’re still getting these multi-million-dollar visions of barely averted Armageddon trickling in, like so many half-baked and disorganized Y2K consultants who didn’t get their shit together far enough in advance to make a real killing on the whole scam. Just in case you haven’t figured out the scenario by now, good has in fact triumphed over evil--so many times, in fact that movie evil is finding it necessary to assume ever less fearsome forms in an attempt to catch the do-gooder bullies off guard and take at least one round off of them.
So in STIGMATA we have the voluptuous-cum-distended body of Patricia Arquette (ah, we once found her beautiful, didn’t we?) serving as the channel through which supreme evil announces its imminent arrival. At least I think that’s the premise. Seeing as how I’ve been ignoring that one for at least a month now, I see no reason to stop now.
Then we have DOGMA, an even more trivial near-miss Apocalypse picture; moreover, I even know what this one’s all about. I also happen to know for a fact that it’s a total piece of shit--but more on that later. In this case, the potential gateway to the end of days is a supposed dogmatic loophole created when a struggling Catholic church in New Jersey tries updating its schtick in order to keep the kids interested. The makeover, presented by
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I’ve never quite understood why Carlin always turns to such crap the minute he gets more than five feet away from a standup stage. Perhaps it has something to do with that look he has of a guy who might just smear his own feces all over his body in private. I suppose you can get away with that sort of thing on stage before a darkened auditorium, but not in a movie close-up. Too bad for him. Actually, it’s too bad for us that he keeps coming back to the big screen, bomb after bomb after bomb.
Not that Carlin is to blame for this fiasco. If anyone is culpable, it’s writer-director Kevin Smith. Smith, of course, made his name with the seminal ‘90s indie film Clerks. A pretty decent little film notwithstanding the cringe-inducing New Jersey accents and supremely awful high-school-thespo acting, its real legacy will always be based on two factors: (1) it inspired a mini-generation of wannabe auteurs to finance ill-fated pictures by running up insane amounts of credit card debt, and (2) its celebrated Sundance premiere turned the festival from an almost genuinely independent (if somewhat clubby), low-key gathering into the kind of scene where a whole bunch of careerist hacks are just looking to cut big deals. (Which means that before we get around to blaming Kevin Smith for Dogma, we should also assign him his share of the guilt for The Blair Witch Project.)
After following up Clerks with the semi-big-budget commercial flop Mallrats (a slight, but not unentertaining teen genre flick), Smith was forced to return to his indie roots, apparently deciding that he had become something of a philosopher and social critic along the way. The unfortunate result was the relatively low-budget Chasing Amy, featuring one of the most ludicrous hetero-produced queer-oriented story lines I’ve ever seen. It was beyond deluded fantasy and beneath the nadir of stupidity, even for New Jersey. I just can’t figure out why it wasn’t at all funny. Having Ben Affleck around certainly didn’t help. Now I don’t know of any real live homosexuals who liked the film, but if there were any that did, they should have their Party cards revoked.
Regrettably, however, the straight Folks responded in a major way to Smith’s clumsily earnest study of imaginary queer identity. Which gave Smith all the encouragement he needed to stick with the strained philosophizing and target-less bloated satire aimed in the vague direction of faceless corporations and dickless organized religion. Having now completed his second film in this mode, Smith seems to have lost whatever cleverness he once had. In the case of Dogma, I don’t think I laughed once during the film’s entire 130 minutes. Not once! That’s pretty rough. And believe me, it is supposed to be a comedy. I mean, even the toilet humor (a shit demon reminiscent of Ghostbusters-era special effects, for example) is unsatisfying and depressing. What’s the world coming to?
I’d also like to say a few words about this recurring pot-dealer Jay character. I’ll let the Jersey accent go, because I know it doesn’t bother most folks as much as it does me. But we’re still left with his near-total inability to swear convincingly. Presumably, Smith is trying to be inventive in the way he structures Jay’s profanity-laced phrases, but the simple fact is no one swears that way... not even in Jersey.
Of course, Jay’s not the only one in this movie with a potty mouth. Just about everybody--saints, apostles, and muses included--doesn’t feel content unless a sentence has at least three "fucks" and a "shit." And this, unfortunately, is the basis for Dogma’s essential conceit--that even semi-deities can be profane, earth-bound savages, just like the rest of us. And indeed, what if God was one of us?
But alas, he is not (oh, and you’ll just love the third-person pronoun confusion that develops in reference to the holy creator... he? she?... it is more like it). "She" is Alanis Morissette, which is of course somewhat ironic in the correct sense of the word, rather than in the misused Alanis Morissette sense of the word. Which is then doubly or perhaps even triply ironic, or maybe triply faux-ironic, and you can just see where that’s going.
Lest my message be confused, allow me to state for the record--I have nothing against God being a Canadian, nor do I expect hesheit to display correct English usage. What I cannot countenance, however, is a supreme being with taste in music that’s this bad. It’s downright heretical.
For more incompetently produced heresy-explained, see THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC. There are many things that make this a very bad movie--Faye Dunaway as medieval French Reverend Mother type; lengthy dream flashbacks; Dustin Hoffman as God or maybe the devil, or maybe just some asshole in a black cape; John Malkovich, period. Altogether, it adds up to something even more hideous than The Fifth Element. But the real sign of how bad this movie is: the production process effectively deep-sixed the marriage of director Luc Besson and star Milla Iovovich. Maybe they would have split up anyway, but it’s not hard to see how being involved in a picture like this could make you hate your mate even more than you already do.
Also, it’s odd that in a 140-minute film, more than half of which seems to be comprised of battle sequences, there are only two really good scenes--that would be the two explosive decapitations, each less than a second in duration. I mean it, that’s all there is to it.
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