For Kevin Smith, it’s the parish priests who take him most by surprise. “They’ll come up to me and be like, ‘Dogma is the movie that I use to connect with the youth!’” Nice, Smith thinks. “Of course, they never mention the anal jokes.”
Dogma, Smith’s potty-mouthed Jesus comedy from 1999, remains his masterpiece: a thoughtfully profane and profanely thoughtful exercise in asking all of the big questions, with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels pulling apart the rules of Catholicism amid a killing spree. Nineties stalwart Linda Fiorentino is the jaded abortion clinic worker recruited by God to take them down. It’s being re-released in UK cinemas this week, in celebration of Smith winning back the rights to the film from its disgraced producer, Harvey Weinstein, and on the heels of a very successful cross-country tour of the film in the US. Smith, surrounded in his LA office by merchandise from the Sixties cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle (“I think I’m trying to recapture my childhood,” he sighs), tells me he’s spent the last year watching Dogma over and over again. He has some thoughts.
