Linda Fiorentino ruined this movie

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watch her in "AFTER HOURS" she is exactly the same in that.

yeah, i feel like she held this movie back.

Just saw this movie (14 years later!) and I totally agree with you. She seems so sleepy and dull. Especially in the restaurant scene with the Metatron, it is like she cant hardly keep her eyes open and is totally expressionless. Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, and especially Alan Rickman are so much more engaged and are fun to watch. Strange.

and then there is Alanis Morisette. There isnt a goofier person on the planet they could have picked to play God! But maybe that's the point. ;-)

http://lebeauleblog.com/2014/01/04/what-the-hell-happened-to-linda-fio rentino/

Linda Fiorentino was a rising star and a major sex symbol in the mid-nineties. She scored critical acclaim with her role as a femme fatale in the neo noir film, The Last Seduction. And then she achieved mainstream success in the sci-fi comedy blockbuster, Men in Black. A few short years later amid rumors of difficult behavior, Fiorentino’s career had cooled to the point where she essentially retired.

What the hell happened?

Let’s get this out of the way up front. This one is a bit frustrating. Fiorentino is one of those actresses who has a reputation for being difficult. Difficult actors and actresses typically make for the best articles filled with stories about on-set temper tantrums and outrageous demands. These are the articles that are the most fun to write. They keep readers coming back for more. In short, I love out of control actors like Stephen Seagal loves cake.

Unfortunately, despite Fiorentino’s reputation, there really aren’t a lot of stories out there to back it up. Only one person has ever really gone on record to claim that Fiorentino was a pain in the ass to work with. And that person was Kevin Smith. Over the years, Smith has transitioned from a promising film maker into a public speaker who is better known for his feuds than his movies. If Kevin Smith has talked *beep* about you, you’re in good company. It’s hardly an exclusive club.

So while I will entertain the theory that Fiorentino’s promising career was undone by her difficult behavior, I don’t have a lot of hard evidence to back it up. The truth of the matter is that Fiorentino’s career remains a bit of an unsolved mystery. Most of the internet has latched on to the “difficult” explanation because it’s what we all want to believe and there isn’t a lot out there to contradict it.

In 1999, Fiorentino starred in Kevin Smith’s religious satire, Dogma.

Smith, who was arguably at the peak of his career at the time, managed to assemble an all-star cast that included Ben Affleck, George Carlin, Matt Damon, Salma Hayek, Alan Rickman and Chris Rock alongside Smith regulars like Jason Lee and Jason Mewes. Fiorentino starred as an abortion clinic worker who may be a descendent of Jesus. She works with “prophets” Jay and Silent Bob (Smith himself) to stop a pair of angels played by Affleck and Damon from destroying the world.

Smith wrote the original script for Dogma before his breakout movie, Clerks. He rewrote the script several times. The third draft of the script was leaked on the internet which angered the Catholic church. Disney was reluctant to release the controversial film, so Harvey Weinstein bought the film back from Disney and released it himself.

Reviews were mixed and the movie was a modest hit at the box office. Despite the star-studded cast, it failed to perform better than your average Kevin Smith movie.

After the movie was released, Smith talked a lot of trash about Fiorentino to anyone who would listen. According to Smith:

“The biggest pain in the arse I ever worked with… Linda Fiorentino. When we were making Dogma, the cast was working in a favoured nations type of affair where everyone was getting paid the same – scale, which is the minimum wage for the movie business. And we were all trapped out in Pittsburgh shooting this movie, which is the middle of nowhere, so whenever people had a few days off they would ask if they could go to New York, or back to Los Angeles, or elsewhere. I always said “sure”, because why would I want to make anybody sit in Pittsburgh if they’ve got something else to do?

Linda, on the other hand, had to work every day on the movie because she was in every scene, so she really never got to leave and she got irritated when cast members would go elsewhere. She got really angry about that and asked me to do something about it. And I said, “What am I supposed to do? I mean, they want to go away and they’re not working, so that’s fine.” And one day she stopped talking to me for a whole day, because she was so irritated by the fact that other people got to leave the set. That was kind of weird. The weirdest experience I had making a movie.”

Incidentally, Fiorentino is not in every scene in the movie. In fact her part was scaled down to make more room for bigger stars like Damon and Affleck who were featured prominently in the film’s marketing. Smith touched on this in an interview with TV Guide in which he talked more trash about Fiorentino:

“Linda created crisis and trauma and anguish. She created drama while we were making a comedy. She was ticked off that there were other people in the movie who were more famous than she was.”

“She saw the poster and went nuts. They put her head on another body because she never did a photo shoot. The body had more cleavage than she has and she was pissed that nobody approved it with her, so she refused to do any more press. It’s not like we were hinging on all that Fiorentino press — I fought to cast the woman in the movie.”

Dogma Poster

This is a stark contrast from what Smith had to say when he was promoting Dogma. Here’s a quote from the film’s promotional material:

Kevin Smith originally envisioned Bethany as a young, inexperienced heroine like many of the humans who populate his comedies, but when Fiorentino read the script and aggressively pursued the part, she altered his vision. “Linda really changed my perspective on the character,” states Smith. “She redefined Bethany as someone who’s done some hard living, who’s taken some knocks, who’s questioning her faith as an adult. She brings a real humanity and experience to the role that befits someone who’s lived through a lot and has a lot of questions. She also became a much better foil to Jay and Silent Bob’s adolescent goofiness. She can say ‘I’m a woman; why are you treating me like I’m 14?’”

Says Linda Fiorentino: “When I read the script, I just said there’s no way anyone else is allowed to have this part. I thought it was extremely clever and it had very imaginative answers to all my childhood questions about angels and devils and the apostles and all that stuff.”

Fiorentino was complimentary of Smith as a director:

As for working with Smith, Fiorentino has christened him “the Reluctant Director.” “He’s not innately a control freak, which is almost a contradiction in terms for a director,” she comments. “He’s a genius writer and a great actor and he is very generous and respectful in his treatment of other actors. You really didn’t want too controlled an environment on this movie since Dogma is a comedy about things falling apart.”

At least one cast member had nice things to say about working with Fiorentino. Hayek said, “”I really bonded with Linda. She’s such a strong woman and she’s become my mentor in that way.”

So, what the hell happened?

Well, Fiorentino definitely stopped working. How much of that was personal choice, we’ll never know. Aside from the critical acclaim from The Last Seduction and the overall success of Men In Black, her career never really gained all that much momentum. Even if she wasn’t difficult to work with, it’s likely her career would have cooled off anyway.

Whether she was actually difficult to work with or not, there is no denying she had a reputation for being difficult. In Hollywood, perception is reality. Odds are that reputation cost Fiorentino work whether or not it was deserved.

Was Fiorentino difficult to work with? There really isn’t a lot of evidence to suggest she was. The only person who publicly spoke out about her being hard to work with was Kevin Smith. And he’ll talk *beep* about anyone. These days, it’s how he makes a living. So while I imagine there is some truth to Smith’s allegations, I don’t put too much stock in anything he says.

But those rumors are persistent. When you hear a rumor often enough, you start to believe it. I mean, I don’t know one way or another. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Fiorentino was something of a prima donna. The kind of praise she garnered for The Last Seduction is bound to do a number on your head.

I felt exactly the same way, she drags this movie down with her presence on screen. The first half of the movie is especially bad because she's on for so long. Every scene where she and another character are having a conversation she seems so bored and fake that she takes the fun out of the dialogue. If they'd gotten any other actress the movie would have been so much better

I thought she was fantastic. Her performance was very grounded which blended nicely with the over the top performances from other actors. She didn't ham it up.