I think Dogma is one of the funniest and cleverest movies ever filmed and yet it got ho-hum reviews. Ironically enough Kevin Smith’s follow-up "Jay and Silent Bob strike back"got good reviewe even tho it was juvenile humor. Dogma is smart and a really biting satire with the humor in the dialogue and often subtle as opposed to the Mel Brooks school od comedy. I am a big fan of Smith and i think this was his masterpiece.I adore the script and it must be the movie i quote most. It did kinda fall a aprt at the end, but before then…pure heaven.
hm, Well I hated it. As I was fond of saying, it put the “dog” back in “Dogma.” It was (IMHO) stupid, poorly acted, no plot, unfunny, boring, etc. Maybe if you had something against the Catholic church it would feel “edgy” (I’m Jewish). Of course, I HATE Matt Damon (that buck-toothed git) and I’m not too fond of Ben Affleck either.
BTW, I enjoyed “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.”
My problems with Dogma:
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The whole scene with the Shit Monster could have been scrapped. A lot of money for special effects for zero plot purpose. A relic from Smith’s days making comic books. Grow up, Kevin.
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Many praised Dogma for addressing theological issues in a mainstream Hollywood movie. I on the other hand found Smith’s take on religion more as an elaborate Dungeons & Dragons game to be played, lots of arcane rules to be followed. There was a shallowness to the spirituality.
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Chris Rock can’t act. Every line reading, the same.
I really couldn’t get into it. Too much of characters show up to have lengthy dialogues and monologues and not enough plot, which can pretty much be summed up in two or three sentences. It felt like a play. It probably would have been a really good play.
Loved Dogma, hated Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. I thought Dogma was very well written and made you think but humorous at the same time without being insulting.
I thought it was hilarious and brilliant, cynical yet ultimately hopeful.
I hated Dogma. It was ambitious and had some hilarious bits - George Carlin as the bishop and the “Buddy Jesus” concept - but taken as a whole it was disjointed and less than the sum of its parts. He set out at the beginning that the fallen angels were condemned to Wisconsin for all time, but then without adequate explanation he let said fallen angels travel to New Jersey. The big climax was a less that epic gun battle between a bunch of losers.
So, either one loved Dogma or hated it.
I love the movie. The deleted scene with Linda Fiorentino about her abortion was amazing. It is a shame it would have slowed the pacing of the movie down.
Funny, that’s exactly how I felt about the whole exercise. You probably could have cut out about half of the characters too, and that would have helped. I don’t think the special effects were that necessary either. Stripped of those things, it would have made for a quite decent small-theater production.
Not that I would suggest that the Catholic college I work for should put it on, though. 
I loved it. I know it wasn’t technically well-done, and the best acting in the movie was done by Kevin Smith himself… but I still love it. I wold have liked to see the deleted scenes left in - both Bethany’s abortion revelations and Azrael’s picture of life in hell were worth seeing. My feeling here is that since the movie wasn’t that well-paced anyway, what difference would it have made to leave those scenes in? And I really love Kevin Smith’s dialogue-writing.
(But, you should probably know that I also think Desperado was a good movie.)
I found Dogma to be interesting. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it either. I watched it with a group of people. The thing that I found interesting was that we all laughed - but at totally different times.
I liked it, although, it is a bit disjointed and there is way too much exposition. That’s a problem in all of Kevin Smith’s movies, I think.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back sucked big, fat, donkey ding-ding. It was so disappointing.
Talk about missing the whole point of the film. Strict Roman Catholicism is often about the rules before the spirituality-- which is why it has so many splinter offshoots from people who couldn’t put up with rules that beggared belief.
Just go ask some middle ages Pope how much it costs to be absolved for killing a man.
Probably my least favorite Kevin Smith movie. Most of the dialogue was apparently taken verbatim from my high school bong sessions, but was delivered up like it was some amazing revelation. I guess I wanted it to be more challenging: I spent most of the movie saying to myself, “Yeah, I know all this, I get it already, now can we have some plot, please?” I didn’t exactly dislike the movie, I was just really underwhelmed. Especially since it took three tries to see it in the theater. It was sold out the first two times I went.
Oh, and I loved Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. So stupid it’s brilliant.
Yeah, but every two-bit Wednesday night comic has some crack about the Catholic Church. “Dogma” was no different - it brought up the same hackneyed jokes, but raised no particularly poignant observations.
Count me in on the “ho-hum” crowd. Smith tries too hard.
I respect your opinion, but what does his making comic books have to do with the movie?
IMO, there were a few funny bits, some good images (the angel staggering around with his wings severed), but overall I didn’t like it. The movie was disjointed, just kind of jumping around, and didn’t really tie together all that well and there were a number of just irrelevant scenes, like the whole demon of dung bit, that didn’t add to the movie and weren’t that good on their own. It played more like a set of comedy sketches than a whole movie. I also got annoyed with the preachy tone; to me there was a vibe of ‘hey, taking this religion thing seriously is bad, you need to just do what you want and chill’ (and it’s pretty hard for that kind of preachiness to bug me, since I’m a godless heathen).
An ambitious failure. It was didactic and dreary in both plot and visuals. Endless scenes of exposition were seemingly connected in a piecemeal fashion and the acting was flat and uninspired. Often, Smith’s tedious theological monologues and his tedious fag jokes were delivered in the same tedious monotone.
I found it all so…tedious.
The shit demon scene…well, it was what it was. And I for one like dialogue-laden movies, provided that the dialogue is interesting. And I found trying to make a movie from the Chrisitan mythos interesting. And I want to see that dialoge and those “240 frames of the most fucked-up imagery you can imagine”.
I rather liked Ben & Matt (Matt & Ben?) as their stars were rising in '97 & '98. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t until watching Dogma that my fondness began to wane. Ben, at least, has worn out his welcome.
Kevin Smith should stick to script-doctoring and acting in character roles. And criticizing George Lucas.