The Kingdom

Saturday night Angela and I went to a sneak preview of the movie The Kingdom about an FBI team (Jennifer Garner, Jason Batement, Chris Cooper, & Jamie Foxx) who go to Saudi Arabia to investigate an attack on the American compound in that country. Others in the movie include Jeremy Piven, Peter Berg (who also directed), Tim McGraw, and some fantastic new faces including Hrach Titizian who played a Saudi military colonel assigned to babysit the FBI team).



When I first saw previews for this movie, I was excited. I love Jennifer Garner, I love her in Alias and think she's at her best when she's kicking some major butt! And the rest of the cast looked awesome (including West Wing alum Anna Deavere Smith) and I love Peter Berg who's in the movie and directed it. So I was very excited to find out Yuma was getting one preview showing 2 weeks before it was released.

And surprisingly, the movie lived up to my expectations and surpassed them. This was one of those movies that just felt right from the first strains of music to the thoughtful, not neat and tidy, ending. I loved the way the story was completely serious yet added humor when appropriate (Jason Bateman is great, so great and Jeremy Piven played an older, more mature Ari if Ari worked for the U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia).

Definitely worth your time and money next week when the movie opens, really. It's well written, emotional, violent and terrifyingly real. While it doesn't take us to Iraq and the war, it does take us to the Arabic world, the world we as a nation are so flummoxed by right now. We have this love-hate relationship that we must negotiate and balance in order to serve our own interests and that of humankind and this film does an excellent job of telling that story.

One more thing, about five minutes into the film, when things start to go wrong, I got goosebumps. It wasn't cold in the theater. I was just so affected by the way this story was being told. I was affected and that's exactly what I hope people feel from my writing. Someday...