A quick note about The Kingdom

It’s really not that bad people.

I’m in slight ass covering mode at the moment after being first out of the gate with a mostly positive review earlier in the year. My bullshit detector’s pretty high and while the film’s flaws weren’t lost on me I came to the conclusion that the film was definitely worth your time, predominantly for the film’s first and third acts and the performance of Ashraf Barhom. Is it probably too jingoistic for its own good? Yeah. Does it use contemporary fears as a pretense for what amounts to a well-constructed popcorn flick? Yep. But my God, it seems like every film that tries to address current world events either ends up as inert crap like Syriana or a condescending brow-beater like In the Valley of Elah. So a film tries to quicken the pulse a bit and it’s treated like John Wayne’s The Green Berets?

And the kicker is Universal screened the film like crazy for the press all throughout the summer so they must have thought it would be well received. Oh well, the public decides starting tomorrow. I think it will play well all through the next month or so, but what do I know?

No mini-review for this one. If you care you can paw through the month-old gargantuan piece.

http://andrewdignan.blogspot.com/2007/04/when-did-peter-berg-become-better.html

Hoo Hoo: Everyone rips me off, Robin

Mildly amusing footnote to this blog which got a shout-out at Jeff Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere blog a couple days ago (my God, just typing that makes me realize how little any of this shit really matters) after Jeff decided to call “dibs” on the expression “C.S.I.: Riyadh” as the go-to glib critique of Peter Berg’s quite enjoyable in a rousing, sort of disposable kind of way, The Kingdom. He went so far as inferring that any review that uses the expression should attribute the quote to him in their review (Jeff would no doubt say this was written in jest but I suspect that’s only a disguise of true intent).

First of all why anyone would want to take credit for being the brain trust behind something that’s clearly a plain as the nose on your face call is beyond me (the hard part is simply googling what the capital of Saudi Arabia is so one doesn’t look like an ass) but more to the point Jeff wasn’t the first person to use the expression in print. Not by a long shot.

As Daniel Feinberg (a fellow blogger/Angelino/Sox fan) was kind enough to point out, I used the expression in my The Kingdom piece that I wrote way back in April. At the time, I assumed everyone would come to the exact same conclusion and was amused with myself for all of eight seconds for coming up with something so “witty” and then moved on. But shoot, maybe I should be seeking out royalties from the two dozen or so major market film critics who have reappropriated the expression. Can we get it written in stone somewhere that I was the first one to belch out this t-shirt worthy expression?

What made me most happy about the whole thing is that before I even had a chance to meekly chime in to plug my site, Feinberg had beaten me to the punch. This implies that I not only have readers but they’re actually retaining this drivel? The mind boggles. Makes me wish I proofread more carefully.

Anyway, you can read the whole sordid affair at the link below. Or you can correctly assume that this self-aggrandizing retelling is probably the most interesting this particular story could *possibly* be and go do something productive with you time. Your choice.

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2007/09/csi_riyadh.php