I read about The Kingdom sometime late last year and with Jennifer Garner being cast in it, it obviously piqued my interest. The trailer looked good and it got some pretty good reviews on AICN, and when I saw a banner ad on Greater Union for free tickets, I thought I may as well enter as it just required accepting some T&Cs, and not the usual "in 25 words or less..." rubbish. Lo and behold, I get an email from them on Tuesday saying I've got two tickets to a screening the next night at George St, and I thought I may as well invite ze chrus for a good ol' mandate since he was probably going to be in China when the movie actually got released [turns out now he's not even going [fag]]. The hack also got tickets, so it turned into a double mandate with him and ron-e coming along.

 

A few people saw the voucher you had to print out to get your two tickets, and it had no unique code or Cinebuzz [Greater Union membership thingi] member number, etc on it, and they rightly pointed out that you could just print several copies of the voucher and they'd have no way of knowing if they were fake or not. Fast forward to 6:40pm—after wasting more money at Myer—and we get to the front of the line at Greater Union and hand over the vouchers and they tell us that the tickets to The Kingdom have sold out...mother frakkers. Obviously some fags have printed away and got there early and walked off with handfuls of tickets; not very suss at all is it? After being hyped for a while, I did NOT want to leave empty handed, and there were quite a few people behind us with vouchers in hand also starting to get angry, although who knows how many of them just had copies. The checkout chicks went to talk to senior management and came back ten or so minutes later and said there's around ten more seats, so we finally got our tickets. We walk in and see that the only seats free are in the FRONT row; joy.  

 

To be honest, it wasn't *that* bad, and I tried to keep moving my neck so I wouldn't end up getting taken the next day. The movie itself I really enjoyed, with everyone in the theatre sitting in complete silence throughout that opening scene, and even with the amount of violence I'm exposed to on a daily basis, I was slightly disturbed and thinking, "holy shit". Jen Garner performed some kickassery that Sydney Bristow would have been proud of, and I really liked the end [hack thought it was cheesy] with both sides' minds being put at ease with "we're going to kill them all".

 

And just for the heck of it, we watched Superbad on Thursday night and Stardust last night. Superbad was cringeworthy, but damn funny, and Stardust was, well, it was alright at best, nothing new, and needed more screentime from Gervais.

 

Also, congratulations to Varun on graduating ~_~ Sick of him complaining that I forgot it was on Tuesday >.<