I found "Four Lions" to be a bit of a hit and miss film really ; parts of it were quite funny (the exploding people, the misdirected SAM) while a lot of it was rather silly with a lot of slapstick and visual gags. Judging by the audience's reaction in the cinema however,they found the film funnier than I did. "Four Lions" tells the tale of four somewhat gormless,amateurish British suicide bombers attempts to create bombs and set them off, either at a mosque,a chemists or during the London Marathon, in order to advance an Islamic jihad , but none of the bombers really looked the murderous type and they came across as bungling misfits. However the problem that I had with the film was the underlying premise that suicide bombing is somehow funny. Try telling that to the relatives of their victims in Britain and the Middle East...
Listen, the premise of this film is that suicide bombers are funny and that them blowing people up is to be considered a source of amusement. I don't think that they're funny in the slightest. Maybe if you lost one of your family to a suicide bomb attack, or lived in an area where people are cowed by fear of them, you mightn't find the bombers so amusing.Personally I did find Allo Allo offensive for much the same reasons as I did "Four Lions". I repeat again ,suicide bombers and terrorists are not funny - they are scumbags - and making them seem comical and inept as this film does is wrong.
You clearly are a bit of an obnoxious ,liberal smart arse with the same mentality as this film maker, who is determined to ram his own views down the throats of anyone who disagrees with him. Allo Allo is thoroughly objectionable because it makes Nazis seem bumbling and funny - they were not - they were ruthless,efficient,sadistic killers. I don't know what you're talking about when you say that "Very few people in the UK have ever died from a terrorist attack". Clearly the 3000 who died in the Northern Ireland Troubles must count as "very few". Not to mention all those maimed in other atrocities and the tens of thousands in Ulster who lived in fear of the no warning car bomb and the late night knock at the door. You're only revealing your ignorance here. Terrorism is not amusing and isn't something we should all just lighten up about and see the funny side of.
@cookdandbombd Chris tells me there's going to be a fragment from Bradford Q&A plus a bit from the foyer interviews on the Four Lions DVD
It's really just this thread starting with the above review which then goes off into this territory:
Needed to know what Q&A stuff is being used, and Sam Bain was gracious enough to reply with the following info:
Hmm it wasn't much of a good Q&A though at Bradford was it?
Nope, took at least the first one or two for Morris to warm up to it, but I guess there's no way they could afford to film everything, so it makes sense to prioritise the premiere(s). Plus, no fan recordings seem to exist of that, so I'm happy enough that some of it is going to be on there. And now that I know which Q&A's they won't be using...I wonder if Charlie Brooker went ahead and suggested the idea of an internet Q&A, as floated on Twitter that time. It's not long till the release, so I guess we'll know soon enough.
Ah yes of course the Q&As that are not on the DVD could be uploaded on a site somewhere as they would not be any copyright issue.
Makes me annoyed though when at the Notts Q&A they were so arsey about asking people not to record it. Like, what else, ask people not to remember it either?
In the meantime Neil you got any comps planned to celebrate this?
....can you remember some comments about Peter Cook in the first one? I'm sure there was some talk about him taking drugs and alcohol, by Morris.
Chris Morris helps train spiesMI5 agents told: Watch Four LionsBritish intelligence agents have been told to watch Chris Morris’s Four Lions movie to get a better understanding of home-grown terrorists.A former CIA spy who provided research for Morris’s comedy about a hapless English jihadist cell told the satirist that MI5 operatives were being ‘encouraged’ to watch the film.Morris made the revelation during a Q&A session at the Latitude festival this weekend, two nights after his latest meeting with Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer in Afghanistan and now a forensic psychiatrist and author of the influential book Understanding Terror Cells.The comedian reiterated that the script, also written by Peep Show’s Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, was inspired by real-life stories from reformed fundamentalists.He said: ‘We spoke to people who walked the path and came back, so we could paint an accurate picture. There’s a guys’ dynamic, even in a terrorist cell.’Morris cited such real-life situations as an Algerian terrorist summoned to Bin Laden in the late Nineties. But at the meeting the visitor told the Al Qaeda chief that he would have nothing to do with his plans as he had his own atrocities, and delivering a withering put-down. ‘Bin Laden was left sitting on a rock looking like a slapped child,’ Morris said.He also said that Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the man convicted over the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, used to spend forever getting dressed as he was obsessed with appearing fat – and that when he quoted from the Koran he’d often get it wrong leaving his ‘co-plotters pissing themselves laughing’.And, Morris, says, it wasn’t just the would-be mujahideen he learned about that could come a cropper, but the security services as well. He recalled: ‘Once on surveillance operations in Northern Ireland, one of them was locked in the boot of the car – and the car got jacked by some youths.‘In virtually any job you will have people say, “You never guess what happened at work today”.’Morris said of the terrorist characters in his film: ‘There’s something ridiculous about them, as there is with every bunch of average blokes. They are basically going to balls it up as they go along.’‘But we felt that as silly as things got, we would never lose sight of the fact the these guys were playing with serious consequences. Being ridiculous doesn’t stop you setting off an explosive. We hope we kept hold of both elements.’He added that no topics should be off limits to comedians. ‘It’s not the subject, it’s how you approach it,’ he said. ‘Any subject can be joked about, it depends if the joke is good enough. You ask, “Are you being funny?” If the joke doesn’t gel, then you take it out. You don’t stop yourself looking at topics because it has a warning on; if it touches a raw nerve, then people tend to be overprotective.’Morris also said he was heartened by the reaction Four Lions had received in the States, where he feared a backlash for joking about terrorism.‘We were perhaps overly concerned about the States,’ he admitted. ‘It’s played at three festivals and gone down well. We felt slightly guilty for having judged them.’Four Lions is released on DVD next month
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