Word: kingdomful
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...While many industry observers speculated that Radiohead might go off-label for its seventh album, it was presumed the band would at least rely on Apple's iTunes or United Kingdom-based online music store 7digital for distribution. Few suspected the band members had the ambition (or the server capacity) to put an album out on their own. The final decision was apparently made just a few weeks ago, and, when informed of the news on Sunday, several record executives admitted that, despite the rumors, they were stunned. "This feels like yet another death knell," emailed an A&R executive...
...Terror there's no sure way to declare victory. But just because our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are less fighting machines than sitting ducks, that doesn't mean that moviegoers should be deprived of go-get-'em war epics - or, in the case of The Kingdom, an old-fashioned , new-fangled action movie with the hint of a political statement...
...Fleury's liaison in the Kingdom is Col. Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), a by-the-book officer who simply must be a decent fellow, since we see him playing nicely with his kids too. The two men bond in standard action-movie shorthand: Fleury punches out a man who had slapped Faris. Then we hunker down to investigation scenes from some CSI: Riyadh: ditch-diggings, bullet analysis and an autopsy. Faris has his own method: he searches corpses not for fingerprints but for missing fingers. Is this a flashback to Hitchcock's The 39 Steps? No, it's evidence...
...Kingdom is written by Matthew Michael Carnahan and directed by Peter Berg (who has a tiny role here, and a bigger one in a more sober War on Terror movie, the forthcoming Lions for Lambs, also written by Carnahan). The movie's guiding force is producer Michael Mann, who made the small- and big-screen versions of Miami Vice. The Mann style is everywhere evident: in the prowling camera and elliptical editing, the pile-driving music (a surprisingly formulaic score by Denny Elfman), the gigantic, pore-probing closeups of the actors' faces, the vigorous ersatz-realism. Everything moves so much...
...That's a mere coda, though, to the film's climactic half-hour, when Berg pours on the adrenaline with cool shootouts, last-minute rescues and the cornering of the evil genius. That should give The Kingdom mass-audience appeal as a retro-fantasy of American grit and smarts, culminating in politico-military triumph. Who needs a stalled, baffled, exhausted Army when our four globetrotting, gun-toting crime-solvers can be sent to the scene to sleuth out and wipe out the bad guys...