Four Lions: USA Reviews, Commentary, Reactions From American Fans etc

[Neil]

So we have weirdbeard's PR thread as a place to list all the interviews with Chris Morris, podcast appearances etc, but now that the film has launched over in America, we're going to need somewhere to archive/link to reviews, blogs, newspaper reports and suchlike. 

Maybe this could be the discussion thread for American fans, too.  Finally got in touch with the PR people, and rather than just a link, they're going to do a little blog on CaB, so I'm hoping I'll have an influx of new American posters soon. 

Anyway, there are a few seperate threads for reviews, and that's fine, there's more room to stretch out now there's a dedicated CM forum again, so don't be all that worried about starting a new thread if you feel it's worth discussion, even if it's been mentioned in here, or weirdbeards thread.

[DuncanC]

Morgan Murphy is a great American stand-up and comedy writer who has been a big fan of Chris Morris for a while - I remember reading a blog of hers a while ago about how much she loved Jam, though I can't seem to find that again now, damn. She currently works on the Jimmy Fallon show, and so just got to meet him (Twitter picture) ahead of tonight's show.

[Barberism]

http://moviebob.blogspot.com/2010/11/escape-to-movies-four-lions.html

Review from Moviebob. Very short but he gives it a thumbs up.

[Revelator]

To take up the discussion aspect...Part of what made Nathan Barley the least of Morris' projects was the subject material being so insular that Morris didn't have to go far outside himself--being genuinely "hip," he didn't have to do research to know a poseur when he saw one. The shallowness of the milieu guaranteed the shallowness of the characters. If NB was insular and hermetic, Four Lions is the opposite: it made Morris do extensive research in history, cultural studies, criminology, and, most importantly, demanded face-to-face interaction with real people from vastly different walks of life. The latter explains the film's uncharacteristic warmth and psychological focus, since Morris has never really created work about people before.
So perhaps Nathan Barley could be viewed as a (flawed) transitional point--Morris's earlier projects were clinical studies of media presentation, but his focus then shifted to the people shaped by the media and even larger forces. The danger in this line of thought is that it suggests Morris has "matured" and created  deeper work. But the psychological approach of Four Lions is the deeply conventional type demanded by mainstream cinema---it's necessary as a vehicle for a sustained exploration of jihadism. So rather than proposing any theories of artistic maturation, perhaps it's better to view Four Lions as a success that demonstrates Morris' formal versatility (i.e., having mastered the mechanics of radio and televisual comedy, he expertly handles the formal tropes--technical and narrative--demanded in a mainstream feature).

That skill is demonstrated in the two great problems the film initially faces--balancing audience identification (how are we supposed to empathize with suicide bombers?) with express disavowal of the bombers' goals, and   how to end the film without a cop out or an outrage (if the bombers are too successful in their goals we feel shameful about having identified with them and reject the film, but if the bombers suddenly have a change of heart and decide jihad isn't worth it, the film rings false). The resolutions of these problems are what make Four Lions an successful narrative. The greatest victims of the bombers are ultimately themselves--the audience interprets their self-delusion as first comic,  then tragic once the consequences are fully shown. "Humanizing" the bombers makes their acts more horrifying, not less.

Our sympathy is not evenly distributed--we probably feel little for Barry, who we understand as a pathetically stunted, but feel more for Hassan and Faisal, who have obviously gotten in over their heads and die clueless and afraid. Poor Waj is stupid but good-natured--those two qualities are fatally entwined to make him susceptible to and confident in his terrorism. Omar doesn't have the excuse of stupidity, but as a devoted family man he earns our initial goodwill, and because his cohorts are so dim, he perversely becomes the voice of sanity throughout the bulk of the film, correcting logical errors so irksome that we overlook their moral complications. As for the ending, the bombers succeed, but in the most pathetic possible way--they succeed in blowing themselves up, and the few innocent bystanders they take with them are precisely the people they didn't wish to blow up. The success is not only Pyrrhic, but stupid, messy, and desperate, and reflects the real life bungling that Morris researched.

My one gripe about the formal properties is the same one I had with In the Loop, whose directorial style is pretty much identical to FL's. It's that the faux-verite look so very popular on TV--so popular that it's become  stylized and conventional. And it looks better on TV too: on the big screen you start longing for Steadicam. We've seen too many fake documentaries by now, and the style has become intrusive and flashy, almost a parody of what Frederic Wiseman pioneered back in the 60s.

On the film's reception: it's wonderful to see FL doing so well on Rotten Tomatoes. And frankly, I have yet to read any negative reviews that are genuinely cogent or even interesting, though I'm sure some would be possible. Many seem to sneer that the film isn't as controversial as it thinks (it never did) or that it doesn't examine the mind-set that gives rise to Islamic terrorism (it gives plenty of hints--if it explained any more it would be a thesis, not a movie). Neither of these complaints have my interest.

If folks are surprised that there hasn't been more controversy, with no Fox News fatwas and so forth, it's because the film is playing to very specific and comparatively small audiences in art-house theaters. If Four Lions was being screened in mall multiplexes I would guarantee that Fox would be calling for Morris' head. In a way I'm sorry that hasn't happened, because the box office would expand exponentially and Morris' past and current work would be a thousand times better known. The top grossing movies in the country right now are Saw 3D, Due Date, Megamind, Red, and Paranormal Activity 2. How sweet it would be for Four Lions to out-earn such shit--and for Morris to grab hold of the national consciousness.

[Glebe]

CHUD.com - INTERVIEW: CHRIS MORRIS (FOUR LIONS).

[Revelator]

Now Roger Ebert has weighed in too--he's the famous of all American film critics, though not the best (depending on your taste, that title would go to Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, or Andrew Sarris). Anyway, it's a positive review and can only help the film in its quest to reach a larger audience.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101110/REVIEWS/101119993

Four Lions [Three Stars]
BY ROGER EBERT / November 10, 2010

There's a difference between blowing up people and blowing up things. When the African National Congress in South Africa was bombing power pylons, that made strategic sense. When terrorists blow up people (and themselves), it strikes me as self-defeating idiocy. Believing in heaven is commonplace. But surely only a stupid person would blow himself up to get there sooner.

"Four Lions" is a transgressive comedy about five such people. They live in an anonymous British suburb and dream of jihad. They speak such a fluent mixture of working-class Brit slang and argot, in such fluent accents, that it's odd to hear their radical beliefs in such commonplace slang.

All are Muslims. Four have Pakistani roots. One is a red-bearded Brit whose ideas are the most aggressive. They conduct a scheme to strap bombs to their bodies and strike against society. In this scheme, they are so amateurish they fly below the radar of British intelligence. Nor do they have a very clear plan; Barry, the convert, believes they should blow up a mosque to radicalize Muslim moderates. The Catch-22 here is that therefore the bomber should be a white Westerner. Hello, Barry.

"Four Lions" is impossible to categorize. It's an exceedingly dark comedy, a wicked satire, a thriller where the thrills center on the incompetence of the villains. It's fueled by both merriment and anger. It shows characters so dazzled by the prospect of the next life that they have no cares about their present lives — or ours. It is about Muslims, but also about the fundamentalist mindset in general, which admits no doubt.

Consider Omar (Riz Ahmed), who I suppose is the film's closest thing to a hero. He has a loving wife named Sofia (Preeya Kalidas) and a sweet child. He works as a security guard. He has a comfortable flat, where he studies terrorist videos on his laptop. He despairs of the ignorance of some of his comrades (one has "special needs"), but perhaps he thinks that even the stupid are useful as suicide bombers. Omar and his wife openly discuss his plans without a shred of doubt.

The others seem average blokes, apart from their fanaticism. They all seem serene about the prospect of blowing themselves up; they attach much importance to entering heaven with smiles on their faces. They have either not received or were unable to benefit from an education preparing themselves for reality. This is sad, and all the more so because the "four lions" (and a young recruit they pick up) are so satisfied with themselves.

There are elements of slapstick, particularly involving an unfortunate sheep (who was "harmed during the making of this film," the end titles tell us). And the climactic sequence involves the four men dressing up in bizarre clown costumes to run in the London marathon. Why? To blow up other marathoners?

During this plan, one lion locks himself inside a kebab shop, taking the owner and three customers hostage. When he's reached by a police negotiator and asked for his demands, he admits he doesn't have any. He seems, indeed, to have little idea why he has a bomb strapped to himself. The importance of blowing himself up and arriving in heaven with a smile has overshadowed any mundane considerations.

"Four Lions" was directed by Chris Morris, a British TV and radio satirist, and co-written by Morris, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (who wrote the political satire "In the Loop"). They have made the film with heedless abandon. Its strategy is to regard imbecility with a poker face and permit horrifying acts to occur absentmindedly. Sometimes this is funny and sometimes not at all, but you can't call it boring.

[Revelator]

Another new and potentially very helpful rave, this time from Time Magazine. Pretty much the best press one could ask for--a great review in a mass-market publication read by people all over the country. Even better, it's also something of a profile and goes into detail about Morris' earlier work--several thousand people will be interested in checking out The Day Today and BrassEye after reading this.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2030491-1,00.html

Four Lions: What's So Funny About Terrorists?
By Richard Corliss Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010

One unquestioned article of faith in political thrillers is that the bad guy is a genius — the supervillain as megamind. In reality, criminals are no smarter, maybe a lot dumber, than the rest of us. That's certainly true of the self-appointed jihadis who, in the wake of 9/11, concocted harebrained plots that hurt no one but themselves. We think of the Christmas Day airplane bomber who blew up his groin; the Times Square guerrilla who left the keys to his getaway vehicle in the car with the bombs; and Iyman Faris, who believed he could destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch.

Chris Morris, the English satirist, is ever on watch for examples of toxic lunacy, and a few years ago he found a piquant news item. It was about "these Yemeni jihadis who were plotting to blow up a warship that was moored in a bay," Morris told Jesse Thorn last week on public radio's The Sound of Young America. "Their plan was to ram it with an exploding boat. So they assembled on the quayside at 3 in the morning. They put their launch in the water, and they filled it full of explosives. And it sank."

There could be a similar crew of Islamic doofuses in the city of Sheffield in north England. What explosive mischief might they create? That's the premise of Morris' brilliantly incendiary new comedy Four Lions: a few radicalized English Muslims plan an attack on the London marathon while dressed in clown outfits. These guys really are clowns, wild and foolish — but no less dangerous, at least to themselves, since they have dynamite strapped to their stomachs. Their incompetence is on display in the movie's first scene, as Omar (Riz Ahmed), the group's leader, is showing his pretty wife and sweet kid a video that he and his mates have made: arms cradling machine guns, they spit out death threats against the West. But the other guys keep tripping over their lines. "These are the outtakes, y' know, the bloopers," Omar says apologetically. He looks at the rest of the video and sighs, "They're all bloopers."

For a quarter-century, Morris, 45, has been lobbing comic grenades at the British media from deep inside it: first as a late-night DJ who muttered derisive comments about news headlines on the air while they were being read, then in 1991 as the host of BBC Radio 4's news-spoof show On the Hour. Morris presided in splendid arrogance over a team that included feckless sportscaster Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan), snooty business newsreader Collately Sisters (Doon MacKickan) and the serially incompetent correspondent Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan (Patrick Marber). Produced by Armando Iannucci, later the mastermind of the fiendishly funny Whitehall sitcom The Thick of It (which spun off into the 2009 film In the Loop), On the Hour didn't deal in topical humor, like the '60s That Was the Week That Was or Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment. Instead, it meant to skewer the tone of TV news, by turns omniscient and truckling, in the production of what the show called "genutainment."

In 1994, On the Hour transferred to TV as The Day Today. This news-show burlesque would lead with Morris' shouted headlines ("Exploded Cardinal Preaches Sermon from Fish Tank"), investigate some big story (a Buckingham Palace fistfight between the Queen and then Prime Minister John Major) and broadcast a disaster video sent in by viewers ("The unnamed woman had been pierced by a shaft of frozen urine which had fallen from the toilet facility of an overhead plane"). Morris and his team would also go on the street to interview prominent politicians and innocent citizens, whose comments would be aired blissfully out of context. Before The Daily Show, this show was mocking the news format — in Morris' words, "hijacking the delivery system." Before Ali G, Morris was pranking the public. The Day Today also ran excerpts of a reality sitcom called The Office, seven years before Ricky Gervais did his show of the same name.

Morris' next assault on genutainment was the 1997 Brass Eye, a parody of sensationalist news theme shows. He'd introduce a perplexing issue, like "Animals: Are We Too Nice or Too Nasty?" and tell the audience, "You haven't got a clue, have you? But you will do if you watch for 30 minutes." The "Sex" episode began with a naked Morris shagging a woman, then saying to the camera, "If this were really happening, what would you think?" This time Morris was not just the host but, in various silly disguises, all the correspondents. He often badgered famous people into agreeing with the silliest propositions (one MP protested he was misrepresented and got an apology when the show went on DVD). In the "Decline" episode, Morris barged into an Anglican church during services, stormed up to the altar, pointed to a copy of the Bible and proclaimed, in the accusatory tone of a British Geraldo Rivera, "We've had this book analyzed. It reads like the ramblings of a drugged horse."

Four Lions, written by Morris and three veterans of The Thick of It (Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Simon Blackwell), applies the kamikaze approach of Morris' TV shows to a quintet of fictional mujahedin. They could be soul brothers to any bunch of not-so-bright movie males, from Mean Streets to The Hangover, who stumble into big trouble — except that this lot has sanctified murder on its mind.

Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) wants to train crows to be tiny suicide bombers. Waj (Kayvan Novak) shoots off a rifle and calls himself a "p**i Rambo," though he also uses a talking toy "prayer bear" to assist in his daily devotions. Hassan (Arsher Ali), the newest recruit, spouts holy-terror hip-hop. At a college debate on Islam, Hassan pulls open his jacket to reveal what looks like a bomb belt but, when it explodes, sends out only paper streamers in what he means to be performance art — "jihad of the mind." Barry (Nigel Lindsay), the one native Englander, also has the group's most bizarre scheme: radicalizing the local faithful by bombing a mosque. Once, as Omar reminds him, Barry "got on the local news for baking a Twin Towers cake and leaving it in a synagogue on 9/11." When the gang's getaway car breaks down, Barry blames it on "the parts — they're Jewish. Jews invented spark plugs to control global traffic."

Omar is the brains of the group, pretty much by default, and the film gets much of its humor from the slow burn on his face as his comrades screw up yet again. To his feebler jihadi-cell mates, he must explain the difference between life and the afterlife as going to a Sheffield amusement park: "Life is nothing. It's like being stuck in the queue at Alton Towers. Do you want to be in the queues, or do you want to be on the rides?" But Omar's no genius either. On a training mission in Pakistan (where, at prayer time, the insurgents have trouble figuring out which way Mecca is), he spots a fighter plane overhead, picks up a ground-to-air missile and fires it the wrong way, at a meeting of radical clerics. One of them, we learn at the end, was Osama bin Laden.

Four Lions has no rational onscreen intermediary — certainly not Omar, who for all his surface plausibility is the most determined suicide bomber. (It's also creepy that his intelligent wife is willing to enable his mission, and that his young son listens raptly to bedtime stories of a heroic bomber dying with a smile on his face.) Stranded without the usual moral compass, the audience is on its own to decide what's funny or awful, or awful funny.

Because the film puts us solely in the company of Omar and his co-conspirators, it has been accused of humanizing them. But, Morris told Thorn, "The whole point is they're human, and that's ... the thing you have to address. Some of them think they're the good guys. Now how do you deal with that? You have to deal with that rage." As his film makes clear, that rage is reinforced by the jihadis' isolation in the cell of their wild scheming. "Just give me a couple of days with three guys in a room," Morris says. "I could turn us into suicide bombers with nothing more than a bit of aggravation, a bit of grief about something and a copy of The Lion King."

In the real world, people like Omar and his gang can't be laughed off because 1) not all of them are idiots and 2) the law of averages suggests that even the dim ones, if enough of them scheme to blow things up, will eventually do some damage. The bloopers could be fatal. Nonetheless, it's Morris' aim to question both the efficiency of homegrown terrorists and the public's sustaining fear of an unlikely threat. The result is the blackest, ballsiest political comedy since Dr. Strangelove. And, for those of strong stomach, one of the funniest.

[Mister Six]

Intrigued by the references to Barry as a 'red-bearded Brit' and 'the one native Englander'. I guess it's technically true but it kind of gives the impression that you can't be properly English unless you're white. Not sure why they didn't just say 'white', actually. Tremendously interesting reading though. Ta everyone.

[Ambient Sheep]

What a curious article!  Fabulous though it is to see such a positive write-up in Time, of all places, it does seem a bit erratic.

Great to see TDT & BE get such long mentions, but sad that -- as far as I'm concerned -- it highlights the wrong bits, mainly the ones that sound most shocking when put into print (the opening of "Sex", the literal bible-bashing in "Decline") rather than the ones that are funniest or most satirical.

Was it written by a Brit?  Although it has the Americanism "north England" (rather than "northern England"), I wouldn't expect to see words like "mates" and "shagging" survive a US sub-editor.

And no points whatsoever for revealing the film's punchline.

But still, Time, woo!!


Also thrilled to see a good review from Roger Ebert, I've been waiting since the moment the film came out to see his take on it; disappointing though and very surprising to see that he doesn't know what "Catch-22" really means.  But that apart, a much better review than the Time one.


Thanks Revelator, weirdbeard and everybody, I must catch up with some more of these now as I've let them slip we've had so many recently!

[Revelator]

Was it written by a Brit?  Although it has the Americanism "north England" (rather than "northern England"), I wouldn't expect to see words like "mates" and "shagging" survive a US sub-editor.

Corliss is definitely American. Most of the Americans who read Time know what mates and shagging refer to (thank Austin Powers for the latter), and the editors probably like the words for adding foreign color. I agree about Corliss choosing the most shocking rather than most substantial bits--that's journalism in a nutshell.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Four Lions won a rather obscure award today

http://www.drafthousefilms.com/814/eurocinema-hawaii-presents-four-lions-best-film-award/#more-814

[Mister Six]

Corliss is definitely American. Most of the Americans who read Time know what mates and shagging refer to (thank Austin Powers for the latter)

Oddly, the first few seasons of the shield has super-hard LA cop Vic Mackey using the word 'shagging'. This is on FX, where you can get away with 'fuck' (and I think Dexter recently had the word 'cunt' in it), so I can only assume that it's somehow entered American parlance.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Although in America shagging can mean a couple of different things, dancing and catching fly balls in the outfield in baseball. I had to stifle a laugh when my friend's 15-year old niece said she was going to a teen shagging contest.

[Squink]

The New Yorker pretty much hated Four Lions. I'm not sure how to get the review on here, as it's behind a paywall on their website. I could scan it from my print copy if there's any interest.

[Dark Poet]

Was that Anthony Lane?  Great writer, terrible critic.

[Revelator]

Was that Anthony Lane?  Great writer, terrible critic.

Yes to both. I doubt the review is worth reading.

[DuncanC]

The Rotten Tomatoes pullquote is enough for me:

"Might this not have worked better, and conjured more startled outrage, as a mock documentary on TV?"

What a point-missing tosser.

[Ambient Sheep]

Corliss is definitely American. Most of the Americans who read Time know what mates and shagging refer to (thank Austin Powers for the latter)...

Ah, of course.  Thanks for the info.

...and the editors probably like the words for adding foreign color. I agree about Corliss choosing the most shocking rather than most substantial bits--that's journalism in a nutshell.

Indeed.  Usually they're a bit more subtle about it than that, though!

[Groodle]

The New Yorker pretty much hated Four Lions. I'm not sure how to get the review on here, as it's behind a paywall on their website. I could scan it from my print copy if there's any interest.

When I read it a few days ago it required me to log in (I used bugmenot.com). For some reason I didn't have to do that today. Here it is:

Four Lions
(director: Chris Morris; 2010)
by Anthony Lane

A comedy about Islamic extremism, from the British director Chris Morris, the most extreme thing being the stupidity of its protagonists. A group of young Muslims in the North of England devise a bumbling but far from ineffective plan to blow themselves up in London and slaughter the innocent in the process. There are clear echoes of an actual atrocity, the 2005 attack on the London transport system, which killed fifty-two people apart from the bombers. (The official inquest has revealed that, in texting each other, those terrorists pretended to be characters from "The A-Team," and such crass borrowing from the Western culture they affected to despise is mirrored in Morris's film; one man turns to "The Lion King" to explain the concept of jihad.) There are plenty of acrid jokes, so many that the final descent into a rueful gloom feels like a shift too far, and Morris, who made his name on television, has less to wrestle with on film; he is so occupied by the ferocious business of ideological mockery that he leaves himself little room to engage with the medium. Might this not have worked better, and conjured more startled outrage, as a mock documentary on TV?

[Squink]

That's actually a much abridged version of the original review, which has been edited so it fits into their listings. The New Yorker does that. Most major movies in the mag ultimately get two reviews, often by the same person.

[Groodle]

Ahh, I wondered.

[Mister Six]

Although in America shagging can mean a couple of different things, dancing and catching fly balls in the outfield in baseball. I had to stifle a laugh when my friend's 15-year old niece said she was going to a teen shagging contest.

It was definitely in a sex context in The Shield.

[lordsnot]

The Shield aired on FX and you can't say "fuck" on FX.  Dexter airs on Showtime which, like HBO, is a channel where you can say anything.

Thankfully we have Louis CK to clear up what can and cannot be said on FX.

http://www.tvsquad.com/2010/06/25/louis-ck-on-the-words-you-cant-say-on-fx/

[Ality Atwo]

Intrigued by the references to Barry as a 'red-bearded Brit' and 'the one native Englander'. I guess it's technically true but it kind of gives the impression that you can't be properly English unless you're white. Not sure why they didn't just say 'white', actually. Tremendously interesting reading though. Ta everyone.

If you think about the difference between 'American' and 'Native American' it makes sense. Surely English is a race as well as a nationality?

[samadriel]

Was that Anthony Lane?  Great writer, terrible critic.

I see his profoundly ignorant dismissal of Alan Moore wasn't a one-off.

[Mister Six]

The Shield aired on FX and you can't say "fuck" on FX.  Dexter airs on Showtime which, like HBO, is a channel where you can say anything.

You can, however, say 'screwing' or 'nailing', both of which sound far more American. Or any of the other hundreds of euphemisms for slipping one up a lady's yahoo canyon.

[Mister Six]

If you think about the difference between 'American' and 'Native American' it makes sense. Surely English is a race as well as a nationality?

Um. No? 'English' is a political and social grouping, not a racial one. You can be English and of Pakistani ancestry as much as you can be American and of African ancestry. Or African and of English ancestry, come to that.

You can be white English and black English. But 'native' is a dubious term in a country that's had as much cross-pollination as Britain has over the last few thousand years.

[Ja'moke]

Didn't think this deserved an entire thread of its own, so I'll pop it in here.

Four Lions voted in the Top 10 films of the year by Time:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2035319_2035308_2035475,00.html

[Richter Scale]

Four Lions named a dark horse Oscar contender in Original Screenplay by Variety.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118028954/

Also, the film has been showing up in some critics awards as of late.  Along with the San Diego Critics' Award for Original Screenplay the film also received an Original Screenplay nomination at the Chicago Film Critics' Circle Awards (it lost to Inception) and received three nominations (British Actor, Screenplay of the Year, and Breakthrough British Filmmaker) from the London Critics.

Here's where I found all of this news:  http://www.awardsdaily.com/

[Richter Scale]

Four Lions wins Best First Feature at the Oklahoma Film Critics awards.

http://moviecitynews.com/2010/12/oklahoma-film-critics-2010-awards/