WHO:	Mixed Reviewers Jill Cozzi and Gabriel Shanks
WHAT:	A meeting-of-the-minds over a steaming hot swig o'swamp water.
HOW:	Soup and goodies
WHERE:	Panera Bread, Edgewater, NJ

GABRIEL: So we're having soup and goodies at...where?

JILL: Panera Bread, in an ersatz downtown in soulless Edgewater, New Jersey. And we have just seen ORLANDO OF ARABIA., or was it GANGS OF THE RETURN OF THE KINGOM OF HEAVEN?.

GABRIEL: (laughs) I'd call it GLADIATOR II: THE RETURN.

JILL: OK, that's good too.

GABRIEL: If you put Gladiator and The Passion of the Christ together, you'd have KINGDOM OF HEAVEN..

JILL: And don't forget sections of The Return of the King, particularly the battle of Minas Tirith. This movie was made because Orlando Bloom really, really, really wanted to be Aragorn.

GABRIEL: I was struck by the fact that it's almost an apology for Europe's treatment of Middle Eastern Muslims, and how Hollywood has changed what it considers politically correct behavior. This movie gives you a bunch of crusading Christians who actually feel bad about sacking Muslim lands....and nearly all the Muslims are very decent good guys. That seems very interesting to me in light of current politics, and a post-9/11 mindset that blamed Arabs for everything. What a turnaround! The Catholic Church takes an enormous beating in this movie. However, Muslims come across as a very pious and devout people. Am I wrong? Do you see this as a major shift in Hollywood's racist history?

JILL: It's a huge shift. I think...it kind of surprises me and I think it's a sign of how badly they expect this movie to do and how little they really hyped it, that there seems to be some concern about that, because you're right...Ridley Scott tries to gloss over really what the Crusades were all about. There's this focus on Jerusalem being this city where everybody's holy sites are...and everybody is living together in relative harmony in Jerusalem, but there are these power-mad guys on both sides who are looking to take it over and just generally causing trouble. Which is in fact, the reality of the situation, but in the current political environment of the United States, to come out with a movie that really says this, is really pretty daring.

GABRIEL: Well, ultimately, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN can't change actual history; it can't get away from the fact that Christians went to the Middle East to conquer the Holy Land. But maybe a movie about that truth can't be made today, not with Israel and Syria and Iraq and Iran and the powderkeg that it is the Middle East. So instead, everyone has to grow a conscience...even the Crusaders have to feel bad about the Crusading.

JILL: And the Crusaders who are bad guys aren't bad guys because they're Crusaders, they're bad guys because they're Bad Guys. there's this really strong anti-Bush Administration subtext in this movie. It is very anti-war...the guys who want war are the barbarians, the political hacks...when the one guy says to the other, especially in the aftermath of this British memo that says that the WMD intelligence was specifically tailored to fit the policy, when he says "Give me a war," and the other one, who's played by Brendan Gleeson, who always plays this role, says "That's what I do," I don't know about you but the hair stood up on the back of my neck, because it seemed very timely. This is an extremely anti-current British/American policy film.

GABRIEL: Yes. And yet and the same time, it is terrified of what the story's actual politics. On the one hand, there's no way to legitimately tell the Crusades as a pro-Caucasian, pro-Christian story. History's pretty clear that the Catholic Church was an imperialist invader. However, Hollywood is still racist enough that it cannot tell the story from the Muslim point of view; it has to tell it from the 'white people' point of view. And the only way you make that work is to bend history a bit, and give the white people this huge guilt and a fake conscience that -- I'm not a historical scholar -- but I don't think the Crusaders had. It's akin to all those movies about Native Americans where white people learn from their simple tribal ways...Dances With Wolves and that crap.

Maybe the most despicable person in the movie is the Catholic priest, who at the end is ready to desert Catholicism to save his own skin. It is an astonishing turnaround, how the Catholic Church is represented so badly.

JILL:--and the priest at the beginning of the film too. I mean, regardless of how you feel about Catholic doctrine, it is really bad form to tell someone who's newly bereaved that his loved one is in hell. And what's interesting is that you have another clergyman in here, played by David Thewlis, who by the way brings the movie to life in the few minutes that he has on screen, which is unusual because I usually can't stand him...but he's almost like the Merlin character in this particular Arthurian story. But he's the only one who has any integrity, and he's the only one who realizes that his church is full of shit.

GABRIEL: I guess that's my question: Is it now OK in a Hollywood movie to bash the Catholic Church -- deserved or not? And are we past the days of Middle Eastern bad guys? 10 years ago, the bad guys in The Siege and True Lies and all those movies came from the Middle East. Are we past that period? Are we in a different kind of world?

JILL: I don't know if we're not past that period or if it's just simply that they're not really promoting this movie as being what it's about.

GABRIEL: What do you mean?

JILL: "Orlando Bloom in KINGDOM OF HEAVEN." And they're sort of playing it almost like Henry V. What scenes do you get in the radio spots for this movie? You get Orlando Bloom's equivalent of the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V--

GABRIEL: Which is terrible, by the way.

JILL: ...or for that matter, Viggo Mortenson's "Today we fight" speech from The Return of the King. And you get Liam Neeson's line from the beginning of the movie, "Whoever dies here today, you shall be among them", which is right up there with Ralph Kiner saying "Every home run George Foster hits for the rest of the season will add to his total" for belaboring the obvious while at the same time making no sense.

GABRIEL: And then, at the end of the movie, in what is perhaps the most ridiculous moment for me, every white person in Jerusalem stands up and cheers because Orlando Bloom has surrendered.

JILL: Which is completely counterintuitive to how noble battles are supposed to turn out.

GABRIEL: For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what was going on. But let's talk about the movie itself, because we've talked about the politics. Is this the slowest movie in history, or what?

JILL: No, I think that honor goes to the second Matrix movie, followed closely by...there was something else during which I fell asleep, but I don't remember what it was.

GABRIEL: For something that has such an epic story to tell, this movie has very little plot. It has very little going on. At first I thought it had a cool edge, and then I realized it has no edge at all. It's kind of sedate and mannered film.

JILL: It has a strong sense of its own epic-ness, and as a result it kind of lingers in every scene. In fairness, it's a film that's very much in love with its own visual beauty, and it is a very beautiful movie. There are some gorgeous moments in this film. There's a shot of Orlando Bloom against a dusk sky that looks like a Maxfield Parrish illustration. There's that lovely moment that looks like an outtake from the end of Millions, with the kids and the toy sailboat when they get the water going.

GABRIEL: But we know that Ridley Scott makes beautiful movies. He's proven that over and over. What I'm missing is that it doesn't have the popcorn pleasures of Gladiator -- the popcorn entertainment value. The shooting style is very similar to Scott's film Black Hawk Down, but it's missing that film's sense of electric panic and confusion. I don't dispute that KINGDOM OF HEAVEN is beautiful, but it's beauty without energy, beauty without substance, beauty without a point.

JILL: But that's why I say it's in love with its own look. But I didn't find a lot of popcorn value in Gladiator, either. I found Gladiator to be similarly ponderous with its own self-importance..

GABRIEL: But it had Joaquin Phoenix chewing on the scenery, and --

JILL: That's true, but this movie didn't have anybody chewing the scenery, and I think a film like this needs that. But here's what I really want to know: Where the heck is Oded Fehr in this film? Where is what's-his-name -- that guy whose name I can't pronounce who was in Hideous Kinky [editor's note: Saïd Taghmaoui] in this film? For that matter, where is Naveen Andrews in this film? I mean, this is the Holy Trinity of Middle Eastern-looking actors, where are they? I mean, where are the hot Muslim guys in this film? NO one is allowed to take attention away from Orlando Bloom, who has a bit of what I call Leonardo DiCaprio's Disease in that he's sort of this wispy, winsome, pretty little boy --

GABRIEL: But this isn't a movie that wants to be hot, this is a movie that desperately wants to be Important-with-a-capital-I.

JILL: But if it wants to be important, why cast someone as lightweight, in all senses of the world, as Orlando Bloom? I kept being reminded of what Chris Rock said at the Oscars. "If you want Russell Crowe, and all you can get is Orlando Bloom, WAIT."

GABRIEL: That was a mean thing to say.

JILL: And I don't think Russell Crowe is as great as everyone else does, but he does have a certain...WEIGHT (no pun intended) that Orlando Bloom doesn't have. They do a really good job; they keep him scruffy, he has facial hair, they load him up with Man-tan, he looks like a young Antonio Banderas in this film. But he's still like a kid doing swordplay.

GABRIEL: Orlando's great when a movie is fun and silly: Pirates of the Caribbean, he's fine. The problem is that KINGDOM OF HEAVEN is neither fun nor silly -- it is ponderous and long and very full of its self-importance. Bloom simply doesn't have the stature to pull off what the film wants to be. I also think that the film goes off onto so many tangents, with the leper king storyline, and Orlando going off to build wells and irrigation...it jumps around, trying to show what a great man Balian is. But you never really get a sense of what makes him great.

JILL: And you don't understand all of these men who would follow him to the death. He doesn't have the stature to command the screen, let alone an army.

GABRIEL: Everyone is impressed with Orlando's character from the first moment of the film. But what has he done? What does he ever do to deserve that kind of devotion?

JILL: And more than that, ok, obviously the Liam Neeson character has stature, but it's obvious that while Balian is his son, he's a son that was sired while just passing through, and yet all of a sudden they have this family bond, and the story doesn't make sense.

GABRIEL: Nor do I understand why this character would go to the Crusades. Yes, he's mourning his wife; I totally get that. But I don't believe that would motivate him to do this completely odd thing on such a lark.

JILL: It suggests that by doing a pilgrimage to the Temple Mount -- God will speak to him and he will be forgiven of his sins. And when that doesn't happen, he figures, well, I might as well kick some ass while I'm here.

GABRIEL: What do you think about the supporting actors? None of them have a lot to do, but it's Jeremy Irons, it's Brendan Gleeson, it's Eva Green...these are actors of import.

JILL: Of the lot of them, Jeremy Irons kind of grows on you as the film goes on. Initially, he comes across almost like late-career Al Pacino, with the haircut and the gravelly voice. But his character got better as the film went on. David Thewlis is terrific in this film. He has about five lines, and whenever he's on screen, he's wonderful. Edward Norton is interesting.

GABRIEL: I don't know what else there is to say about it. Other than what it has to say politically, and what it has to say about Hollywood, I don't think the film is that deep or that resonant or that interesting or that historically accurate...it's a summer blockbuster that doesn't really...blockbust. Is that even a word?

JILL: No...this feels like an Oscar-grab movie in the same way that Cold Mountain was another ponderous, self-important Oscar-y movie, with great beauty and great costumes and very little else to grab you.

GABRIEL: Watch it...I liked Cold Mountain. But Cold Mountain didn't have 200 people fighting in a battle that's supposed to make you feel awful. There's these huge action set pieces that don't really go anywhere. Who are we pulling for?  The morally conflicted Caucasians or the noble Islam warriors?

JILL: Well, I think there's always a problem these days with action set pieces, because Peter Jackson has already done it better. This was the problem with Troy, and everything that's come since, and especially with this, because this particular "movie Jerusalem" even LOOKS like Minas Tirith.

GABRIEL: Only to a hobbit fan like you.

JILL: But I'm not a hobbit fan.

GABRIEL: Let's go over your top 10 list again for the last three years...

JILL: That's right. And I liked the movies, but I never read the books; I was never a Tolkien kook. But there is this gorilla sitting over this movie, and I had this sense that I've seen these battle scenes before, but done better last time, and this time Orlando Bloom was Aragorn, so he didn't get to do all those cool stunts.

GABRIEL: People keep talking about how the costume drama is dying. I don't think it's that people aren't interested in period pictures, I think the stories they're choosing to tell are dull. I think there are plenty of interesting stories to tell about this period. I think there are interesting stories to tell about the Crusades, and what it meant to Christianity and what it meant for Islam, and what it meant for the world at the time.

JILL: But those are "hot-potato" stories. They're controversial. It's clear that Ridley Scott set out here to make as uncontroversial a film about the Crusades as it's possible to do.

GABRIEL: But why would you do that? That's my question. Why would you even try? It's like trying to make an apolitical film about the Watergate hearings. Why would you even bother?

JILL: It's yet another of these King Arthur-type characters, and you even have David Thewlis dressed up like Nicol Williamson as Merlin from Excalibur, and then there's all of these guys who WERE in Excalibur running around, and if you've seen enough of these Arthurian archetype derivative movies, it's like they put them all into a blender.

GABRIEL: It is. OK...sum up.

JILL: It's endless. It's too long. It needs a good editor. But even with a good editor; it is a pretty cipher. It's a beautifully done film with no point. That's my summation.

GABRIEL: Let it ring across the land: Islam is in, Catholicism in out. So sayeth Hollywood.