Kevin Smith is a conundrum of a filmmaker: he's a writer with brilliant, clever ideas who can't set up a simple shot to save his life. It was fine back when Smith was making low-budget films like Clerks and Chasing Amy, both of which had an amiable, grungy feel to them, but now that he's a rising director who's attracting top talent and tackling bigger themes, it might behoove him to polish his filmmaking. That's the main problem with Dogma--it's an ambitious, funny, aggressively intelligent film about modern-day religion, but while Smith's writing has matured significantly (anyone who thinks he's not topnotch should take a look at Chasing Amy), his direction hasn't. It's too bad, because Dogma is ripe for near-classic status in its theological satire, which is hardly as blasphemous as the protests that greeted the movie would lead you to believe. Two banished angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) have discovered a loophole that would allow them back into heaven; problem is, they'd destroy civilization in the process by proving God fallible. It's up to Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a lapsed Catholic who works in an abortion clinic, to save the day, with some help from two so-called prophets (Smith and Jason Mewes, as their perennial characters Jay and Silent Bob), the heretofore unknown 13th apostle (Chris Rock), and a sexy, heavenly muse (the sublime Salma Hayek, who almost single-handedly steals the film). In some ways Dogma is a shaggy dog of a road movie--which hits a comic peak when Affleck and Fiorentino banter drunkenly on a train to New Jersey, not realizing they're mortal enemies--and segues into a comedy-action flick as the vengeful angels (who have a taste for blood) try to make their way into heaven. Smith's cast is exceptional--with Fiorentino lending a sardonic gravity to the proceedings, and Jason Lee smirking evilly as the horned devil Azrael--and the film shuffles good-naturedly to its climax (featuring Alanis Morissette as a beatifically silent God), but it just looks so unrelentingly... subpar. Credit Smith with being a daring writer but a less-than-stellar director. --Mark Englehart
Entertainment
The entertainment industry has grown and evolved over the years with music and cinema taking a new form through the ages and so have the technologies that fuel it. Gone are the days of eight songs on a cassette and VCR players with merely two hours of entertainment recorded on a single video cassette. With the advent of computers came digital data storage and hence the birth of DVD/CDs.
Quiet a step back in matters of physical form as these new generation audio/video storage devices hold an uncanny resemblance to the records that preceded the cassette generation. DVDs and CDs today are an everyday household entertainment storage device which has come a long way since the first records and cassettes were distributed commercially.
Notable advantages of DVD/CDs have to begin with the amount of storage space available. These days its possible to burn multiple movies on a single DVD and as far as audio goes if its in a highly compressed format such as .mp3 a single CD can accommodate multiple music albums. These discs are easy to handle, light and portable with no moving devices unlike the tape generation however they are delicate and a scratch on the DVD/CD surface could cause a disruption in the information being read by the player.
DVD/CDs were initially invented to provide high quality audio/video data to a user with the ability to regulate its production however this soon fizzled away with daily household computers gaining the ability to burn data in such formats. The race to curb piracy through such means has not hit a roadblock and DVD/CDs keep evolving with newer encryption technologies in a bid to curb unchecked replication of data spawning newer technologies like Blu-ray discs which seems to be yet another milestone on an unending road of innovation.
