25 IN DOGMA YEARS

Opening this weekend:

Dogma--God really enjoys the occasional game of Skee-ball. That's a sample of the startling theology we learn from Kevin Smith's Dogma. I'm not sure that's official Catholic dogma, but parts of the movie's twisty plot rely on genuine, if pedantically and literally interpreted, church law, like plenary indulgence. Two cast-out angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) are hoping to exploit this doctrine to sneak back into Heaven after centuries of wandering the Earth (Wisconsin, specifically).

A Cardinal (George Carlin), hoping to get more "asses in the pews" is offering the ally-ally-in-free to anyone who comes to his church in New Jersey. The trouble is that if the fallen duo succeed in doing so, it will negate Divine infallibility, which will wipe out all existence.

This, at least, according to a rather irritable Seraphim (Alan Rickman). For some reason he presses Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a woebegone Illinois woman who works in an abortion clinic, into service to stop this from happening. So Bethany hits the road for Jersey, picking up strange allies and enemies along the way.

I'm not sure I would have guessed that Dogma had a sufficient following to warrant a 25th Anniversary re-release, but it's back in theatres this weekend to celebrate its quarter-century mark, and I'm glad. I've always had a fondness for this messy, irreverent, sometimes offensive yet oddly devotional comedy.

It's a little overlong, and laden with some really dumb gags and gross-out effects. But there's something moving about Smith's grappling with the contradictions of a religion and tradition he clearly loves. And the ruminations and debates he puts in the mouths of his characters seem to me more thoughtful and reflective than those in, say, the Da Vinci Code flicks.

Besides, it's hard to beat Dogma's cast. Along with Affleck, Damon, Carlin and Rickman, the ensemble includes Chris Rock as the 13th Apostle, cut from the Gospels because of his race, Jason Lee as a snide demon commanding a trio of hockey-stick-wielding minions on rollerblades, glorious Salma Hayek as a muse-turned-stripper, and Jason Mewes and Smith himself as the inevitable Jay and Silent Bob, who join the quest to save the universe.

In smaller roles are the likes of Janeane Garofalo, Bud Cort, Alanis Morrisette and even Betty Aberlin (Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood) as a nun. Best of all is Fiorentino, deeply likable in essentially the lead role, maybe the richest, most complex part she ever got to play in movies. Somebody ought to coax her out of retirement.

Ballerina--As it happens, I'm one of the handful who had never seen a John Wick movie. Until this week, that is, when I saw Ballerina. Wick, played as always by Keanu Reeves, appears briefly but bloodily in this action melodrama, which I found myself quite able to follow without a heavy remedial course.

The central character this time is Eve (Ana de Armas), orphaned daughter of an assassin. She winds up at a dance company run by the ever-imperious Anjelica Huston; the place is a front for an assassin school. Once grown up, Eve strikes out on her own in search of the people who killed her dad. These turn out to be members of a death cult of professional assassins who live together in a picturesque Alpine village, governed by the diabolical Gabriel Byrne.

The gore-splattered brawls and shoot-outs that ensue are all but non-stop, and the movie, directed by Len Wiseman, is very watchable and well-done for what it is, which is something fairly stupid. The bad guys here reminded me of the similar sect of murder fanatics in the Sylvester Stallone action flick Cobra (1986), and, as there, they feel trumped-up, spun out of whole cloth. They aren't full enough characters to be satisfyingly hateful.

Ana de Armas is a soulful and amusing presence, however, and vets like Huston, Byrne, Ian McShane, Norman Reedus and the late Lance Reddick provide some fun. But there's an artificial quality to this film's thrills that excludes it from the annals of the great revenge pictures.

Also, I had to wonder: What if you had great assassin skills, but two left feet? Would they reject your application to the ballerina school, or would they look the other way, like with college athletes?

WHO'S WHODUNIT

Happy Black Friday everybody! Hope everyone had a gluttonously wonderful Turkey Day. Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Rian Johnson's Knives Out...

Have a great "Shop Small" weekend everybody!

RUNDOWN

Opening this weekend:

Blade Runner 2049—As the makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey learned, it can be risky to put a specific year into the title of a futuristic sci-fi movie. Ridley Scott’s 1982 favorite Blade Runner, set less than two decades off, in 2019, showed us a Los Angeles in which special cops of the title moniker hunt synthetic humans called “replicants” who have gone rogue. The film’s smoggy, neon-lit vision of the future was scary, but it also had a garish glamour, and accordingly it was done in the style of an old-school film noir—in its original release, it even had hard-boiled narration by Harrison Ford’s title character.

That’s the version I saw back in ’82. I remember enjoying it enormously, but it didn’t become the cultural touchstone for me that it did for so many others. I remembered it less for its plot and more for its details—Joanna Cassidy and the snake, Brion James getting a bullet in the head, William Sanderson’s little guys wandering around the Bradbury Building, Daryl Hannah doing somersaults, Edward James Olmos doing origami. I never saw any of the various director’s cuts and alternative versions that became as complicated as the quarto-versus-folio textual history of a Shakespeare play. I think I may have only seen it the one time, and in any case I hadn’t seen it in decades when I saw this sequel.

This one is set thirty-some years from now, and the glamour is gone. The environment has collapsed, California is a hazy, snowy, defoliated wasteland, and farmers raise grubs for protein. But there are still fugitive replicants, and thus still blade runners. Our title character this time is K (Ryan Gosling)—a spiritual cousin of Kafka’s Josef?—and the twisty, violent mystery he chases unfolds against backgrounds that feel almost like expressionistic stage sets.

That’s about as much of the story as I feel comfortable describing, however. After the screening I attended, a studio rep read us a lengthy list of “requests” from the filmmakers about what we mustn’t reveal, even going so far as to suggest wording to us—they seemed to want to bioengineer replicant movie reviews.

I will say that while the script, by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, shows influences ranging from Soylent Green to Logan’s Run to Cherry 2000 to Children of Men to Her to, just maybe, Kurosawa’s Ikiru, it’s ingenious and intriguing, and that director Denis Villeneuve, abetted by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, gives the film a superb look. Villeneuve also gets strong performances, from Gosling, from Harrison Ford as Deckard, the now-reclusive hero of the first film, from Robin Wright as K’s boss, from Sylvia Hoeks as a relentless corporate operative stalking the same quarry as K, from Jared Leto as her satanic boss, and from the beguiling Ana de Armas as K’s roomie. There are startlingly erotic passages, and terrific touches of verisimilitude, like when Gosling stares in fascination at a dog, presumably a rarity in that world.

On the downside: As he showed in last year’s impressive Arrival, Villeneuve is great at generating a brooding sci-fi atmosphere. He does the same for Blade Runner 2049, but the result, this time, is that the movie is glacially paced. It feels almost an hour longer than it needs to be, and even the action and fight scenes, though often shockingly violent, feel oddly lacking in urgency. And the movie’s environmental bleakness, though marvelously realized on a visual level, also grows a bit oppressive over nearly three hours. I just wish that forecasts like this didn’t seem so plausible these days.

 

My Little Pony: The Movie—Not a whit less bizarre and immersively imagined than the Blade Runner flicks is this new animated feature realization of the Hasbro toy line from the early '80s. It centers on the relentlessly cheery equine inhabitants, mostly distaff, of Equestria, some of whom are winged, some of whom are horned, all of whom are colored like Jelly Bellies.

The story involves an incursion into the city of Ponyville by Tempest (well voiced by Emily Blunt), a sinister magical pony with a jagged stump where her unicorn horn should be. She and her minions are trying to corral four top Pony Princesses in order to steal their magic on behalf of the demonic Storm King (Liev Schreiber), in return for a restored horn.

Tempest imprisons three of the princesses, but the fourth, Princess Twilight Sparkle (Tara Strong), eludes capture. She and her friends, which include a manically upbeat pony, a fashion-and-design-obsessed pony, a Reba McIntire-ish "cowgirl" pony and a diminutive dragon, set out in search of help, with only the mysterious clue “hippo” to guide them. In the course of their quest they encounter everything from airship-borne pirates (Zoe Saldana among them) to a sly, dandified feline hustler (Taye Diggs).

For followers of the franchise, which I'm told include not just children but many adult fans, this movie may hit it out of the park, but I found it a trifle flat. The plot seems boilerplate, and with the exception of a witty line here and there so does the dialogue. The theme is the value of friendship, which is preferable, at least, to the believe-in-your-dream platitude that's usually shoved at us as the moral of this sort of movie. But the songs in which this ideal is extolled are insipid recitatives without a memorable melody in the bunch.

Well, I take that back. "Rainbow," the song that Sia co-wrote and sings at the finale, is quite pretty.  And the pony character through which she sings it has a mane that hangs down over her face. Nice touch.