come anticipate SYRIANA with me

better than traffic

syriana was great. traffic and the kingdom sucked balls bigtime.

traffic is bad but at least made an effort at characterization. it had a complex plot but ideas-wise it wasn't that complicated.

it had convenient color-coding

in this film the doctor from deep space nine gets blowed up

with a doctor from ER

who previously teamed up with the country singer in a movie about odysseus

while the kid from GWH watches his family implode

and america runs on gas

the end

Syriana has neither Benicio del Toro bargaining with the feds while floating in a pool, nor teenage crackheads - ergo it cannot be superior to Traffic in any way.

The Kingdom would have been a lot better had it been an actual Michael Mann film instead of trying to be intelligent and CSI-y. Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper runnin' and gunnin' through Saudi Arabia would have been enough.

Chris Cooper is criminally underused, actually. Both of his awesome lines are in the trailer. Fuck that.

if they'd shot 'the kingdom' like 'miami vice' and had more terseness i'd be happy as larry, fuck the politics.

the actual investigationy bits were pretty weak. and i couldn't work out if the bad guys at the end were in cahoots with the national guard guy all along etc, which wouldn't have mattered if it'd been more like 'heat'.

i liked syriana more than traffic -- which is a seriously bad film -- but they both pretend to be way smarter and tougher than they are. the dumbest thing in syriana is the very end, where we're still presented with this all-powerful (if, you know, deeply flawed and corrupt) america, in which flinty dudes in washington can nail anyone anywhere with the flick of a switch, and watch the carnage on big-screen tvs. (i also hate movies where they kill off a kid for no good reason except to up the emotional ante.)

syriana doesn't have a white girl's sleeping with a black guy as being the key "rock bottom moment" so i'm gonna go with my og pick

i also hate movies where they kill off a kid for no good reason except to up the emotional ante

the kid's death is a pretty major plot point as it provides a reason for prince nasir to hire matt damon

this movie was all hat and no cattle. at times it felt like it was being shot and edited by a film student -- there were striking shots but then some real clunky ones (i.e. FEET running UP THE STAIRS); even that set-piece speech about corruption was ruined by OCD editing and weirdo jerky off-center framing. when so little is trying to communicate so much, with so little connective expository tissue, please let us just concentrate on the characters and what they're getting across.

anyway i agree that a whole movie about the pakistani kids would have been 1,000,000,000,000,000 times better.

come on, it wouldn't really have been a quadrillion times better. maybe just a little.

i thought the dude from star trek did a good job.

If anything, this is better a decade later.

ISIS, wealth stratification, all here.

found this movie Bad

i liked it much better the second time. more than traffic, anyhow.

less racist or trite than Traffic but also less pretty & purposeful. Character arcs in Traffic make sense. motivations here are just confused.

i dont need a film to tell me american imperialism will steamroll the lives of good people, id like to understand how ppl respond to that experience & apparently the answer is like, wave a white shirt & forget about how important your family is for a little while . . . . so many loose ends that dont really relate to anything else & so they just kill half the cast at the end to tie it up idk not into it

I learned one important message from this very shite movie; put an RCBO on the swimming pool lighting circuit dude.

Thought about watching this tonight, thinking I never saw it. Decided to check ilx to see what folks thought. Evidently, 4.5 years ago I did see it, and hated it! Good to know. A little worried about my brain health