Movie Star Blog

Kingdom of Heaven is getting lots of coverage in the blogosphere. Must have touched a nerve.

The modern age of the cinematic epic began with Braveheart's mix of old-fashioned, widescreen, guts-and-glory filmmaking (well, the guts part, anyway) and modern morals and messages. Braveheart begat Gladiator, which added a light frosting of computer-generated effects to help the combination of bleeding-heart ideas and blood-spilling action go down. Now, Gladiator director Ridley Scott is back in modern epic territory with Kingdom of Heaven — yet another big, brawny film that somehow tries to reinvent the grisly, barbaric...