Jill Leovy, a reporter for the LA Times, runs a blog called The Homicide Report, in which she covers every single homicide in Los Angeles County (undisputedly one of the most violent locales in the U.S.). Yahoo News recently published this feature on Leovy and her efforts to help the victims’ grieving families.
The most memorable part of a movie is usually the big climactic scene towards the end. You know, where Jimmy Stewart’s neighbors pay off his debt to the old wheelchair-bound curmudgeon, or where Bogie gives his “if you don’t get on that plane” speech, or when the Nazis get their faces melted off because they opened the Ark of the Covenant. Well, if you go to see Jamie Foxx’s newest film The Kingdom (which also stars hometown girl Jennifer Garner), you’re going to witness one of the memorable events in the movie right after the trailers end.
Pretty standard stuff, I have to admit. Still, The Kingdom isn’t one of those shoot-‘em-up-kill-all-the-bad-guys-ooh-rah movies. Although the film takes a wholly understandable “terrorism is bad” stance, the writer and director made sure to show the humanity of both sides of the conflict. The screenplay doesn’t allow the viewer to sympathize completely with the film’s terrorists, but at least these men are shown as real people with families and belief systems instead of cardboard cut-outs who are as dispensable as Dixie Cups at a frat party.
These sympathies climax at the end of the film, when a rather disturbing parallel is revealed (I won’t give it away; it’s the cornerstone of the movie’s message). The resulting product is one that will engender a sense of patriotism, only to dash it all in the next scene. For all its blood, gore, and explosions, The Kingdom is an action movie with a heart. radiating an emotional complexity not often found in the genre. It’s as schizophrenic as Middle Eastern politics, and probably won’t be named the feel-good movie of the year, but it’ll definitely make you think.