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By Cole Smithey

‘The Kingdom’

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There’s a lot of bang for the buck in director Peter Berg’s juiced-up “what-if” illustration of a U.S. Special Forces rogue team responding to a massive attack on oil company employees and their kin inside the imaginary safety of a housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Top heavy on the power of personal vendetta to resolve anti-capitalist violence overseas, “The Kingdom” trades on the same lowest-common-dominator anger that turned “Rambo” into a winning franchise. Immediately after a series of carefully timed blasts kill more than 200 people, including first-responders, FBI investigators Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), Grant (Chris Cooper), Janet (Jennifer Garner) and Adam (Jason Bateman) go off the reservation with a secret five-day mission to carry out a surgical take-no-prisoners investigation in Riyadh. 

Put in the hands of a standoffish and ineffectual Saudi military, Fleury gradually makes friends with Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) who unknowingly helps obtain a Royal endorsement for Fleury’s crew to go after the cell responsible for the carnage. Fleury’s and Ghaz’s not-so-meet-cute friendship mocks the script’s stream of insults lobbed at the incompetence of Saudi military and at America’s stonewalling bureaucracy. Know-it-all explosives expert Grant commands Saudi officers to drain water from the explosion’s initial crater, and learns that an ambulance was used to disguise the assault. The implication here is that Saudi investigators are far inferior to the Americans who must teach them how to conduct a proper investigation. The infuriating irony is that no such investigation was ever put in place at Ground Zero before or after President Bush initiated a war with Afghanistan 18 hours after the planes hit the towers.

“The Kingdom” is a testosterone-amped big budget brother to Richard Shepard’s “The Hunting Party,” a movie that suggests that a close-knit crew is enough to bring down any criminal, even an Osama bin Laden. It’s the same school of opinion that says trained squadrons of U.S. Air Force jets could and should have performed aerial escorting maneuvers to prevent the 9/11 hijacked planes from hitting the World Trade buildings. This arena of informed thinking is an affront to the corporatized military complex, busy funding a trademarked “War on Terror” that has already bilked trillions of dollars in worthless contracts from American taxpayers. The fact that Hollywood institution Michael Mann (“The Insider”) produced “The Kingdom,” speaks volumes about the level of outside-the-box political thinking going on in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is no lead-by-example Zen thinker. Arabs are portrayed as lesser people. Their military is disorganized and brutal, their Prince leader is shown as an easily influenced spoiled brat and Arab civilians equate somewhere beneath American projects-housed citizens. The plot comes to rest on Fleury’s team locating an Arab with missing fingers, because “every bomb maker gets bitten by his own work.” Director Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”) orchestrates an action-packed chase sequence wherein resident FBI black-humorist investigator Adam gets kidnapped before being taken to a secluded apartment to be decapitated for posterity on videotape. Although Adam’s imminent death ramps up the suspense, the contrived situation bears no resemblance to actual methodologies of Arab kidnappers who keep their victims alive in order to attract media attention before ever killing them.

A bullets-blazing climax plays as a hollow trump card before Carnahan’s tacked-on fatalist political statement that gets whispered to the audience in big bold letters. Zealotry is all around, and it’s a product that certain CEOs know how to package with impunity. How long do we have to stare into the abyss? From the message of “The Kingdom,” we’ll hit rock bottom before we get the answer. CV

‘Into The Wild’

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Sean Penn directs this thoroughly satisfying account of Christopher McCandless’s wilderness journeys that Jon Krakauer eloquently brought to light in his 1996 best-selling book. Emile Hirsch (“Alpha Dog”) personifies the fiercely idealistic and self-absorbed young man who severed ties with his upper middle-class family in search of personal truths on a literary-fuelled odyssey that ended near Alaska’s Denali National Park. Intermittent voice-over narration from McCandless’s sister Carine (Jena Malone) combined with samples of her brother’s writing and bits of text from the authors he constantly read, add layers of vital framework with innovative cinematic textures. Catherine Keener, Hal Holbrook, Brian Dierker and Kristen Stewart contribute memorable supporting performances as people won over by McCandless’s ineffable charms.

For a story so fraught with potential landmines, Penn, bridges delicate narrative constraints to fulfill expectations of audiences familiar with Krakauer’s book. What we see is a person who pushed himself to the edge at every opportunity and in doing so compressed a lifetime’s worth of experience into a very narrow margin of time.

Upon leaving high school, Chris made a fact-finding mission from his family’s middle class burb of Annandale, Va., to the vicinity of El Segundo, Calif., where he was born. There, he heard from past family friends about how his aerospace engineer father Walt (William Hurt) had kept up relations with his first wife Marcia, even after taking up with Chris’ mother Billie (Marcia Gay Harden). Walt secretly split his time between the two women long enough to sire a son from Marcia, two years after Chris was born. The dark revelation of his father’s base behavior instilled a silent burning rage in Chris that he would attempt to vanquish in the cold air of solitude.

After graduating with a double major in history and anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta, McCandless gave away his life savings of $24,000 to charity. He soon burned his cash and abandoned his old yellow Datsun after getting caught in a flash flood in Nevada. It was an act of quiet defiance against society that would dispatch him through South Dakota, Oregon, California, Mexico, Arizona, Washington and Alaska over the next two years, during which time he renamed himself “Alexander Supertramp.” Penn’s decision to film at many of the exact locations that McCandless traversed colors the story with an indisputable sense of authenticity. Especially significant is the film’s setting in and around the now famous “Fairbanks City Transit System 142” bus abandoned in the Alaskan wilderness.

On April 28, 1992, McCandless hiked 20 miles into the Alaskan wilderness along its Stampede Trail with a .22-caliber rifle, a 10-pound bag of rice and a field guide to edible plants of the region. It was here that he came across the abandoned shell of a 1940s International Harvester bus in which he would set up camp for the remaining 113 days of his life. During that time, he lived off the fat of the land, eating squirrel, porcupine, birds and a moose. But McCandless made a fatal error by eating the toxic seeds of wild potato roots that were not mentioned as poisonous in the book he referenced like a bible. Before succumbing in his sleeping bag within the shelter of the bus, Chris achieved his vision of a solitary primal existence necessarily based on a hunting and gathering lifestyle far removed from the mechanized bubble of the Western world.

McCandless’s story divides people. On the surface, it seems another instance of a young unprepared adventurer with a thinly veiled suicidal fantasy who gets exactly what he bargained for. But the layers of meaning, motivation and purpose surrounding his experience come through in the letters he wrote to people he befriended on the road and of their remembrances of their time spent with him. We come away feeling that we at least know who McCandless was, a young man with a burning desire to simplify his existence. CV

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