Coming SoonFour LionsCinema Release Date: 19 Aug 2010 Director: Chris Morris Featuring: Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak, Adeel Akhtar Rated: TBC Run Time: 102 minutes Country of Origin: United Kingdom Genre: Comedy Could there be a more hot-button topic than terrorism these days? Although it is historically the subject of serious documentaries and intense dramatic films, renowned British comedian Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brass Eye) finds the humour (and ultimately the humanity) in this extremist world.Four Lions tells the story of a group of British jihadists who push their abstract dreams of glory to the breaking point. As the wheels fly off, and their competing ideologies clash, what emerges is an emotionally engaging (and entirely plausible) farce. In a storm of razor-sharp verbal jousting and large-scale set pieces Four Lions is a comic tour de force; it shows that - while terrorism is about ideology - it can also be about idiots.Based on three years of research and meetings with everyone from imams to ex-mujahedeen - not to mention a wealth of surveillance material from major trials, Four Lions plunges beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien or evil. Instead, it portrays them as human beings, who, as we all know, are innately ridiculous.Check out the trailer. You'll never be able to listen to Toploader's "Dancing in the Moonlight" in the same way again.It's been hugely popular in the UK - so much so that the distributors have had to double the number of screens it is playing on to keep up with demand. And if you think we're just blowing our own um.. bombs, check out these reviews from Time Out and Film Shaft.We also heard that one of the cast members is releasing a single next month. We'll be checking that one out on i-tunes for sure!Click here to read our latest news about Four Lions, and check out this rare bit of behind the scenes footage......and this for an even rarer interview with Chris Morris!And, since all of the above, director Chris Morris and star Kayvan Novak have been to Sydney to pay us, and the Sydney Film Festival a little visit. Check out the photos on the right.
Come and see Four Lions first with MumbrellaMumbrella is delighted to invite our Sydney and Melbourne readers to join us next week for a night of dark comedy about terrorism.We’re holding free preview screenings of Four Lions, the Chris Morris-directed comedy about British suicide bombers.Pic courtesy of Time OutMorris is one of the world’s most respected TV comedy makers having created the likes of The Day Today and Brass Eye. Among those who cite his influence is the team behind The Chaser, who met him during the Sydney Festival premiere of Four Lions.Four Lions, distributed by Hopscotch Films, is released in Australia on August 19.
[image]Man on a mission ... Riz Ahmed as bomber Omar.Deadly funnyRiz Ahmed leads Jihad Joes in search of a holy war in Four Lions, writes George Palathingal.Rising British actor Riz Ahmed is sheepish when asked where he is when Metro calls to talk about his edgy new comedy, Four Lions.“Ooh, you don’t wanna know where I am right now,” he says, only making us even more curious. “Well, mate, I’m on the toilet seat. Where else are you gonna be able to take interview calls? Ha ha ha!”The time being 9 am in London, it turns out Ahmed’s partner is having a lie-in in the adjacent room and the actor doesn’t want to disturb her. (And he insists that he isn’t, shall we say, multi-tasking.)We’re off to an aptly amusing start, given Four Lions’s high laugh count but the film, written and directed by satirist extraordinaire Chris Morris (British TV’s The Day Today and Brass Eye), gets its comedy from a sensitive source.The four lions in question are a group of British Muslims led by Ahmed’s Omar, who want to be jihadist soldiers.Unlike Morris’s past work, this film is technically not a satire.“Four Lions isn’t taking the reality of jihadism and skewering it or turning it on its head,” Ahmed says. It’s showing us the full reality of it. It’s showing us the bloopers; it’s the out-takes reel.“You know, behind every kind of distilled, terrifying headline is a whole barrage of different kind of clusterf---s that have taken place because, ultimately, leading up to that headline is a bunch of guys trying to organise something. And a bunch of guys trying to organise something is gonna be a balls-up on one level or another.Omar’s crew is quite spectacularly‘These are suicide bombers. But people are people first.’Riz Ahmedinept. Between them, they take out fellow soldiers with a bazooka pointing the wrong way at a terrorist training camp; get distracted from their plots by home karaoke; and say the most ridiculous things when filming would-be serious threats.“The thing that came up time and time again in my research and that was most instructive for Four Lions was, you put into YouTube ‘jihadi’ or something like that,” Ahmed says. “What will come up is, y’know, you’ve got this guy in Bosnia in the mid-’90s going, ‘Brothers, come to Bosnia. Fight. The country’s beautiful, the people are beautiful and, brothers, the kebabs are amazing.’“And you’re like, ‘What the hell did he just say? Did he just say come and fight jihad because the kebabs are amazing? Yes, he did.’”The subject matter is a perfect fit for Morris, who has long shown he has no problem tackling material that might be considered taboo.In Brass Eye (1997-2001), for example, he cleverly lampooned the way the media can (mis)handle everything from teenage drug addiction to paedophilia.Importantly, while much of Morris’s output has proven controversial itself, it is never deliberately so. “The idea of controversy itself, to Chris, is boring,” Ahmed says.“There’s something quite, like, masturbatory to walk into a room and go, ‘Wa-hey, look at this, we’ve caused a stir.’ That’s not the idea. The guiding light in every decision in this process is, is it funny?“His work is kind of known for its controversy but I think that’s just down to the braveness and freshness of his choices and the insight that he gives us into areas that we’re generally uncomfortable to delve into. Not because he’s setting out to make us uncomfortable, he’s setting out to make us laugh.”Four Lions isn’t just funny, it’s also moving. This didn’t surprise Ahmed because, he says, “any story where you’re investing in characters will move you”.Even though this lot are willing to kill innocent people, Morris homes in on why you might sympathise with them. “On paper, these are terrorist jihadi suicide bombers,” Ahmed says. “But, primarily, no matter how you try and look at stuff, people are people first, particularly if you spend a lot of time with them.“What defines them is, like, their stupid voices or their obsessions with crows or their bad taste in music or whatever.“Those are much more real, kind of relatable things for us to hold on to in people than what their political ideology is, or what they do for a living, even.”FOUR LIONSDirector Chris Morris Stars Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Adeel AkhtarRated M. Opens Thursday.Five other fearless filmmakersRobert RodriguezActed as a human guinea pig, testing drugs to part-finance his debut film, El Mariachi. Resigned from the all-powerful Directors Guild of America so he could credit Frank Miller as co-director of Sin City. Most daring of all, recently worked with Lindsay Lohan (on the upcoming Machete).Sacha Baron CohenAs the provocative Bruno (right), Cohen went further than his loveable idiot Borat, if less[image]successfully, overall. Still, mocking a suspected terrorist to his face and participating in a live gay tryst in front of a room full of homophobic rednecks took king-sized cojones.Oliver StoneSalvador, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July tackled war - including, in two instances, the eternally controversial Vietnam conflict - before Stone rubbed many people up the wrong way with the sexy murderers of Natural Born Killers and the ultimate conspiracy movie, JFK.Michael MooreName a contentious issue in the US and Moore will make a doco about it. The (pre-Obama) healthcare system? See Sicko. The Bush Administration after September 11, 2001? Fahrenheit 9/11 raised temperatures. Gun culture? Bowling for Columbine won him an Oscar.Quentin TarantinoFor starters, he has inspired at least two of the above as the writer of [image]Taking aim ... Michael Moore.Natural Born Killers and as a regular collaborator of Rodriguez (Sin City, Grindhouse). Doesn’t hesitate to use the C-word and the N-word in his dialogue and is happy to splatter blood and guts on screen.GP
Enjoyed the little impromptu mini-solo Feedback Report in that interview.
Here's the edit, but the whole podcast is an engaging listen. Great interview too - many old stories, as you'd expect on a PR appearance, but they have a good rapport, and Morris is a bit more entertaining than he's been on some of these things lately. Some funny moments.
It's up.FOUR LIONS REVIEW TRANSCRIPT:http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2970912.htm
I think Chris Morris is a bit too clever for me. I didn't find this film funny at all, except for a couple of moments. Ultimately I was left with a feeling of profound sadness. The never-ending riff on the comedy of extreme dumbness I know a lot of people find hilarious, but it bores me. I didn't believe these characters, is anybody that stupid? And so I found it difficult to enter into the spirit of the film, despite the fact that performances are completely convincing. Morris has used satire to rail against people's suggestibility, and this film certainly delivers that. But I just don't get it. I don't get this film.It seems to me that Morris has tried to create comedy with a message, but about what? How dumb terrorists are? Or maybe how dumb audiences are. I wish I could be more informative, but it's beyond me. David help!
MORRIS WEB EXCLUSIVE CLIP*:http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2970947.htm*Anybody want to either rip the clip or the audio and make it a download for CaB?
Showing my ignorance here, but have there been any successful terrorist incidents carried out by the Muzzies over there, Bean? I know a number of people have been arrested under anti-terrorism laws passed after 9/11, but is the Australian perception of Muslims as paranoid as it is over here?
Chris Morris: Playing with fireMichael BodeyFrom: The AustralianAugust 21, 2010 12:00AMDirector and satirist Chris Morris on the set of Four Lions Source: Supplied ENGLISH comedian and first-time director Chris Morris knows that these are the best of days to be producing comedy."We live in these tempestuous times so in a way there's no better time for comedy to get stuck in," he says. "There's a whole dollop of harsh reality out there which should produce some really great comedy."Problem is, cinema isn't quite nailing it. The Judd Apatow school of sweet profanity is having growing pains and attempts to make something extraordinary of big-budget comedies such as Land of the Lost and Tropic Thunder fizzled.And that's just commercial comedy. Search for more demanding satire or provocation and you're likelier to find it on television, not at the cinema. Film comedy is stale."The first time you see a genre spoof done well it's great, but the 900th time?" Morris asks. "Come on, it's not really interesting."Morris, creator of the incendiary British TV comedy series Brass Eye, has made a very interesting comedy film, Four Lions.It comes hot on the heels of another terrific British comedy, In the Loop. Its creator, Armando Iannucci, and Morris made their name together -- along with Alan Partridge creator Steve Coogan, playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber, and Jerry Springer: The Opera co-creator Stewart Lee -- on the BBC radio comedy show On the Hour, which later became the mid-1990s TV series The Day Today.Iannucci's In the Loop, an eviscerating look at Westminster and White House politics during the war on terror, makes a neat companion piece to Morris's Four Lions, in ways other than peer symmetry.Four Lions is a comedy about bumbling London terrorists that is simultaneously outrageously funny and just plain outrageous. Morris says the films are of the time, maybe even of a generation."After all, In the Loop is rather bleak and if you don't speak that comic language -- generations one or two above mine are not familiar with the comic argot of it -- then it's the bleakest film they've ever seen because the reality of it is inescapable," he says. "I guess people might have said the same thing about Dr Strangelove when it came out [but] these things should make great comedy."Morris was always a likely candidate to push the envelope and make a "terrorism comedy". An enigmatic figure, he steers clear of establishment luvvies and rarely gives interviews.An Australian comparison would be with serial provocateur John Safran or The Chaser, but neither has pushed comic boundaries quite like Morris.His Brass Eye series -- a current affairs spoof -- made his name but also stereotyped him as a "media terrorist", a comedian who lobs grenades with little concern for the consequences. Working the public and the media into a lather was the means and the end. In essence, though, his comedy is simple: he despises pomposity, ignorance and stupidity.Brass Eye pricked those balloons by, for example, duping celebrities and public figures into recording public messages against a new drug called cake. It launched a campaign against pedophilia called Nonce Sense.The pedophilia-themed episode of Brass Eye generated thousands of complaints and tabloid hysteria, and earned him the sobriquet "the most loathed man on TV". The reaction proved his central tenet that there was uncommon hysteria and ignorance about the subject.Even so, a 2005 survey of writers and comedians ranked Morris No 11, behind Peter Cook, John Cleese, Woody Allen and Groucho Marx, and ahead of Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers and Steve Martin.Four Lions is a little less incendiary than Brass Eye, but only slightly. Ostensibly, it's a caper comedy about four would-be jihadis who want to bomb the London marathon. It's part Keystone Cops, part Dr Strangelove, part Z, but all Chris Morris.The impact is heightened by one big sucker-punch: you can't help but fall for the principled Omar (played by Riz Ahmed), Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), Waj (Kayvan Novak) and even the boorish Barry (Nigel Lindsay), all of whom are terrorists."You say 'comedy', 'Muslim' and 'terrorist' and basically you set off three grenades in people's heads," Morris says. "If they can still look you in the eye you're quite lucky. We had a lot of people who had the look of three grenades having gone off in their heads who simply lost the power of reasonable speech from that point onwards. So it was difficult to get funded. But then you'd be surprised if it wasn't."The idea came from a rather banal supposition: that terrorists are no different to anyone else; they're as shambolic and ill-informed as the rest of us. And treating terrorists, or those suburban warriors with skewed notions of jihad, as foreign or alien only increases fear and anxiety.Morris finds comic contrast between the mundane suburban settings and the horror of the broader subject matter. As he has explained elsewhere, Four Lions is merely "big thinking in small places. It's a fairly standard comic position".Morris premiered the film in the English city of Bradford, with an audience that was 20 per cent Pakistani Muslims. Whites in the audience thought the film was anti-Muslim yet the Muslims were unconcerned, says Morris: "They saw what it was and what it wasn't, but that's the ignorance thing again."If you don't really know what you're talking about one of the first things you're going to do is get anxious as soon as something becomes seemingly contentious."Morris wanted to explore how the war on terror has so drastically shaped our culture since September 11 and the London 7/7 attacks. Then he discovered the inherent humour in how jihadists were preparing and presenting themselves. "I wasn't looking for it at all, but I started being hit by examples of things that were funny in this context that shouldn't have been," he says.Morris refers to a 2002 interview by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, chief plotter of the September 11 attacks, when he was still at large. Mohammed fell into "a major funk" about what he was wearing and whether it made him look fat, and spent two hours faffing about. When he jumbled his Koranic verses, the Muslim journalist corrected him and the co-plotters in the background "started pissing themselves"."This guy's behaving like a sitcom character rather [than] a master of terror," Morris continues."You find there is a lot of banana-skin idiocy in the close-up detail of how these cells work, of the mistakes they make and the arguments they have between each other, which is not a million miles away from the People's Front of Judea [in Monty Python's Life of Brian] arguing with the Judean Popular People's Front."Similarly, transcripts of conversations between British terror suspects could be read like "rough work-outs for really dark scripts". Morris chuckles as he recalls one English jihadist, on tape, saying he'd only recently begun watching the news and asking whether "this bin Laden guy has he done anything else?" Another thought bin Laden had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre with guns blazing."You immediately get a different sense of how these people are when you read stuff like that, and one example doesn't stand for all but what we tried to get in the film is this combination," he says.Morris encountered criticism from liberals -- who panicked that he was being racist -- and from others who believe terrorism to be a subject beyond jokes. People feel they are on safer ground when making jokes about political leaders, Morris says, because we have such an avalanche of information about them. He cites Tina Fey's recitation of Sarah Palin's speeches on Saturday Night Live as comedy enough. "In those areas, it's safe, because it's taking the mick out of the boss," he says. "That's what political satire is, isn't it? At some level, it's grumbling about the people in charge. . ."With [terrorism], it's frightening, we're hugely misinformed in a very sort of mono-linear way and there is very little ground material, very little personal knowledge in people's lives. . . Most people have not sat down with a jihadi cell."Morris spent years immersing himself in Islamic history, terror, interviews, public meetings and the minutiae of fundamentalism. Ultimately, though, he leaves a few holes and Four Lions may not be the masterpiece many expect some day of him. After all, it is his first film. But it has an all-too-rare energy, curiosity and point of view that is lacking in so many modern comedies."It would be a dereliction of duty if it was a hop, skip and a jump and a good laugh and out, forget it," Morris says."What you want is as much laughter as you can get out of your 90 minutes but in some way you want to touch the core of what is going on as well. It would be weird, wouldn't it, to have a comedy about terrorism that at some level didn't make you feel, make you stop and think."
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Topic: Four Lions on general release in Australia, 19th of August + NEW Aussie Podcast (Read 3940 times) Share
