journal features

movie review - Three Kings

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.10.14

This is an interesting little number set during the closing days of the first Gulf War. With incredible prescience, the story twitches about from scenes of partying US soldiers to the failed Iraqi uprising to environmental disaster. All the while, a certain 90's detachment makes you wonder just how real anything is despite the bullets and bloodshed that mark what is otherwise a rather good caper movie (even if it is one with a message).

The choice of cast (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, Spike Jonze, and Jamie kennedy) heightens the irony of a movie about some renegade US soldiers trying to steal a vast fortune in gold and ultimately delivering some Shia refugees to safety.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner