REVIEW COURTESY Kurt Halfyard

Hello, it's 3:37a.m. and I'm just back from a slew of screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival. Of special note, I caught the Dogma Screening and was lucky enough to sit in the packed Uptown Theatre with about 1200 other people to witness Kevin Smith's fourth feature film. I was impressed, but not blown away by the 2h04min show. It certainly ranks up there with Clerks, Chasing Amy and (I'm one of those who actually liked) Mallrats.

The plot of two angels finding a loophole in dogmatic law and thus endangering existance by proving god's infallibility has been widely publisized. I'd rather focus on the aspect of the different segments of the film. It has a great opening with Bartleby & Loki (although the Catholisism Wow bits were not as funny as I expected). In fact, all the scenes with Barteby & Loki work incredibly well. The segments with Salma Hayak work less well and there were times that I wish the entire character was cut from the movie. Chris Rock is hot/cold, but handles most of his scenes quite well. I was somewhat disappointed in Alan Rickmans performance, as he came off a little whiney instead of the 'bored with his job' feel that I believe Smith was looking for. Jason Lee (who carried Mallrats almost singlehandedly & most of the humour in Chasing Amy) fell into a Jim Carrey-style mode of acting which annoyed me somewhat at first, but as the movie progressed, I grew to like it. The Jay & Silent Bob parts for the most part were very good, especially a certain joke that is set up early in the film and pays of near the end.

Overall plotting of the movie felt contrived a few times, but for this type of subject matter, I don't think that it matters all that much. What I got out of the movie was a good time filled with the usual amount of in-jokes, great dialogue, movie references (and bashing) and more potty humour and crude sex talk than his previous three movies combined (Which I assure you is a GOOD thing for Dogma, it works well to balance all the christian/catholic exposition). The movie was followed by a very humourous Q&A from Smith which he fielded some dumb questions and trashed a guy for asking him about the whole superman thing and that alone was worth the admission price! There is a good chance that I will catch this again in the theatres to see what my second look at the movie was and I look forward to anything he does in the future. Don't miss this one when it comes out.