What good is geopolitical turmoil if you can't have some fun with it? Hollywood has been posing that rhetorical question for a long time now - from Ninotchka to Rambo by way of a battalion of World War II combat pictures - but it has so far been a bit squeamish about turning the various post-Sept. 11 conflicts into grist for escapist entertainment.
The Kingdom, a whodunit/blow-'em-up directed by Peter Berg, corrects this lapse by taking aim at the ethical nuances and ideological contradictions of the war on terror and blasting away.
Berg, an actor whose directing skills improve with each project (his last for the big screen was the underrated Friday Night Lights), shows himself adept at the rapid cutting and hectic camerawork that are fast becoming the lingua franca of action filmmaking.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
The Kingdom takes the breathless visual precision of the Jason Bourne movies out of the abstract hall-of-mirrors universe of intra-CIA skulduggery and into a semi-plausible world of international tension. Rather than explore that tension, as some other, more ostentatiously serious movies coming out shortly seem poised to do, Berg and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the screenwriter, do what they can to relieve it with fireballs and frantic chases. The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: Syriana for dummies.
Which is not entirely a put-down. Intricate, earnest puzzles have their place in the movie cosmos, but so do lean, linear stories with clearly defined villains and heroes and lots of explosions.
The members of the cast, which includes two recent Academy Award winners (Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper), do not trouble themselves exploring the finer points of their craft, but their unpretentious professionalism is nonetheless satisfying to watch. Foxx does most of his acting with the muscles in his jaw and his upper arm, delivering terse dialogue in a silky whisper. Cooper punches the folksiness buttons as a forensics expert whose aw-shucks manner masks a steel-trap mind. Jason Bateman is the class clown, and Jennifer Garner, no slouch in the jaw-flexing department, also exercises her tear ducts and her trigger finger.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
The four of them play FBI investigators who travel to Saudi Arabia (the kingdom of the title) to investigate a horrific double terrorist attack on US oil company workers and their families. The team's trip is opposed by the State Department and the lily-livered attorney general (Danny Huston), who don't want to antagonize an important ally. Backed up by their no-nonsense boss (Richard Jenkins), the Forensic Four nonetheless head to Riyadh.
Their motives are personal as well as professional, since one of their colleagues was killed in the attacks. Their presence is barely tolerated by the Saudi authorities, many of whom are either incompetent or in cahoots with the jihadis. Meanwhile, Jeremy Piven shows up as an embassy flunky whose job is to prevent Special Agent Fleury (Foxx) and his colleagues from doing theirs.
But Fleury recognizes a fellow good cop in the person of Faris al-Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom), a Saudi colonel who helps the Americans both before and after the bullets and rocket-propelled grenades start flying. Once they do, the good guys are in the familiar, physically perilous but morally gratifying position of being out-manned and outgunned with the cavalry nowhere in sight.
"I'm not saying America is perfect," Fleury says, "but we're pretty good at this." If by "this" he means making high-impact action movies, it's hard to argue. And The Kingdom, hair-raising as it is, is also curiously soothing in its depiction of US competence and righteousness.
Just as Rambo offered the fantasy of do-over on Vietnam, The Kingdom can be seen as a wishful revisionist scenario for the US response to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. In some ways it's an anti-Iraq movie, not because it expresses opposition to the war there but rather because it makes no mention of it. Instead, the film spins a cathartic counter-narrative. After a murderous terrorist attack a few of our best people - four, rather than a few hundred thousand - go over to the country that spawned the terrorists, kill the bad guys and come home. And they even leave the door open for a sequel.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
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