By Jason Apuzzo. There are a lot of independent film projects we’re hearing about all the time here at LFM. Something we wanted to show you today, during this extended Fourth of July weekend, is a trailer for the forthcoming web series Red Storm. We’ve embedded the trailer for this series above.
The filmmakers keep things mysterious, but the series appears to have as its premise a scenario that seems straight out of the new Red Dawn film, coming this fall from MGM. Some sort of massive occupying force – Chinese communist? Russian fascist? – invades and occupies America, and a hearty band of freedom fighter-rebels fight back.
It’s interesting, of course, that this sort of invasion anxiety is reappearing in American filmmaking, as we’ve discussed previously.
The imagery used in the trailer is effective, ominous and compelling. Marching armies (Chinese? North Korean?) … nuclear testing … the protestor stopping the tank in Tiananmen Square … the 9/11-style imagery of a crumbing building, shattered by explosions, raining debris on cars below … with those cars being passed by what look to be Chinese tanks. Continue reading Red Storm: The Return of The Red Menace?
By Govindini Murty. Today we commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Iran democracy protests. I’ll be commenting at greater length later on some of the fine recent films by Iranian filmmakers that have explored Iran’s current social and political issues. For now, though, I wanted to show you two interesting short films on Iran.
The first film, titled Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, is a fast-paced, informative two minute short about how Iranians have embraced blogging in order to express themselves freely to the rest of the world. It was directed by Aaron Chiesa as a project for the Vancouver Film School. (I have fond memories of Vancouver Film School from my early days as an actress when I was living in Vancouver, as I acted in some of the school’s short films.) The short features striking animation reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (in fact, I think a couple of shots were used from Persepolis) – and a catchy, exotic, pop-music sound track. You can watch Iran: ANation of Bloggers above.
The second film is Exile Paranoia, a ten minute short by Iranian filmmaker Nassrin Nasser. The film explores in a haunting, meditative manner Nasser’s own feelings of alienation and confusion as she seeks to get a visa/passport to leave Iran and come to the West. Exile Paranoia moves at a dreamlike pace that is the opposite of Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, but I like the contrast. And while Iran: A Nation of Bloggers features black and white animation done in the radical-chic, populist style that dates back to Soviet constructivist art (and that was most recently seen in Obama’s “Hope” poster), Exile Paranoia is a softer, more intimate film that explores one woman’s emotions in a poetic, understated style. I like the subtle use of color in Exile Paranoia – from white to cream to green to blue – and the dream-like, computer-composited shots of night-time Tehran. I also find it interesting to see a brief glimpse of life from the viewpoint of an Iranian woman filmmaker. Whether I would agree with her feelings about the West or not (the one Western male in the film is portrayed as a cold jerk, but maybe that’s just what this filmmaker has experienced), it’s still interesting to see life from her viewpoint.
By Jason Apuzzo. IndieWIRE is reporting today that North American rights to Duane Baughman’s 2010 Sundance documentary Bhutto have been picked up by First Run Features. A November theatrical release is planned for North America, with home video, internet platforms, and television to follow. According to IndieWIRE:
“Bhutto” follows the epic story of Benazir Bhutto, the first woman in history to lead a Muslim nation. She was born into a wealthy family that has become Pakistan’s dominant political dynasty. Often referred to as the “Kennedys of Pakistan,” the Bhuttos share a painful history of triumph and tragedy, played out on an international stage. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, Benazir’s life changed forever when her father, Pakistan’s first democratically elected president, chose Benazir, instead of his eldest son, to carry his political mantle. After her father was overthrown and executed by his handpicked Army Chief, Benazir swore to avenge him and to restore democracy – or die trying.
We’ve embedded the film’s trailer above. We’re pleased to see this film get picked up. Benazir Bhutto was a fascinating and complex woman whose shocking assassination in 2007 ended the hope of many people that the current Pakistani regime could be effectively reformed. Bhutto’s story, and that of her family, is very much the story of modern Pakistan. We will keep an eye on this film, and report down the line on screenings.
[Editor’s Note: LFM has recently been covering a series of provocative films debuting at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Chris Morris’ striking new film Four Lions, which showed yesterday at The Los Angeles Film Festival is so wickedly funny, shatters so many taboos, and is so brazen in its satire of Islamic terrorism – and the vacuous political correctness that supports it – that it’s a wonder Morris isn’t in a witness protection program right now. Not that he would need to be protected from jihadis, whom I imagine spend little time watching indie cinema – but from the Western cultural establishment, whose protective covering over the lunacy of Islamic radicalism Morris rips away with comic gusto and flair in this marvelous new film.
Four Lions was a big hit at Sundance earlier this year, and has already done killer business at the indie box office in the UK (it opened the same weekend as Iron Man 2, yet had a better per-screen average), but the film has yet to secure distribution here in the U.S. Seeing the film last night, it’s not hard to understand why. This uproariously funny and sophisticated film, that had the audience in hysterics from the opening scene on, is nonetheless so subversive in its vision of Islamic terrorism – so thoroughly and mercilessly dismissive of any justification for terrorism – that by the end of the film any lingering shred of sympathy that might exist toward the terrorists’ point of view has simply been pulverized. Imagine starting up a heavy-metal band fresh off watching Spinal Tap, or becoming a French police officer after watching Peter Sellars play Inspector Clouseau, and you can imagine the kind of effect Four Lions must have on young Brits thinking of starting up a terror cell.
Total morons.
Four Lions is about a bumbling UK terror cell living in Sheffield. The two key leaders of the cell are Omar (Riz Ahmed) – the only reasonably sane or professional one in the group, around whom most of the film revolves – and Azzam al-Britanni (or ‘Barry’ to his friends, played with Falstaffian flair by Nigel Lindsay), who’s actually just an abrasive, working class white-guy convert to Islam. Nigel Lindsay’s portrayal of Azzam al-Britanni almost steals the show; the combination of belligerence and stupidity he brings to the character is pitch-perfect. Other guys in the terror cell include the sweet but utterly moronic Waj (Kayvan Novak), and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) – a mumbling doofus who for some reason is convinced he can train crows to be suicide bombers. A fifth member of the group, Hassan (Arsher Ali), is a pretentious wanna-be rapper (his music conducts a ‘jihad of the mind’) who is recruited while Omar and Waj are in Pakistan botching their terrorist training.
The film follows the different members of the group as they struggle to conceal their activities, aided only by blind luck – and a kind of inane cunning – with the film climaxing in the terror cell’s effort to bomb the London Marathon. That last sequence in particular is a tour-de-force of action, comic-timing, suspense … and ultimately, great emotional power. Without giving away the film’s ending, let’s say simply that Four Lions does not exist to pull punches about the full tragedy and inhumanity of terrorism.
Trying to light a bomb.
What struck me the most about this film was the intelligence and sophistication Chris Morris and his actors brought to this material. The trailer for the film (see below) captures the opera buffa aspects of Four Lions – but not necessarily the anarchic, Paddy Chayefskyian verve and insight of the film’s satire. Having made a film on this subject matter myself, I can tell you that Morris has accomplished no small feat in bringing out the sheer lunacy of the terrorist worldview – while keeping the tone light, and respecting the earthy humanity of the characters. The inevitable question that films like Four Lions or The Infidel or Living with the Infidels or Kalifornistan always inspire is: is the film ‘humanizing’ terrorists? And the answer is, of course, yes … which is exactly what real-world terrorists, intoxicated with their self-image as divinely inspired warriors, never want. In the real world terrorists do not consider themselves mere human beings … but jihadis inspired by Allah. This is the pompous bubble that Four Lions exists to pop. And pop it the film does, with the force of an atomic blast.
What has happened to American filmmaking that we let the Brits get to this subject matter first? Watching Four Lions I was reminded of how utterly repressed, how politically correct, how tendentious and boring American filmmaking has become of late. How have we become so morally clouded and unsure of ourselves, so confused by our own basic humanity, that we can’t make clear-eyed films like this anymore? As recently as the 1970s, I think a film like Four Lions would’ve still been possible to make in the United States. For now, however, it apparently takes the Brits to make a film like this – and the only way to see it for the moment here in the U.S. will be through bootlegged copies, digitally smuggled-in via the internet. It’s almost like we’re living in the the old Soviet Union, actually. Congratulations to the LA Film Festival for breaking the blockade. Memo to Fox News, talk radio, the blogosphere and related alternative media: you should get behind this film NOW, and bang every pot and pan you’ve got, so that this film gets proper distribution. Or else this film will basically not be seen here in the U.S. – and that would be a genuine tragedy.
One final note: Govindini and I had a nice chat after the screening with actor Kayvan Novak, who plays the clueless ‘Waj’ in the film. He did a wonderful job in Four Lions – there’s nothing tougher than playing dumb on camera, and doing it in an entertaining and engaging way – and we wish him and this scintillating film the very best.
By Jason Apuzzo. A new Bollywood film called Tere bin Laden (Without You, Laden) that satirizes Osama bin Laden, is apparently set for release next month (on July 16th) according to the AFP.
Tere Bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek comedy about an ambitious young news reporter from Pakistan who is desperate to migrate to the US in pursuit of the American dream. His repeated attempts to immigrate are shot down as his visa is always rejected. But when things couldn’t look worse he comes across an Osama bin laden look alike. Ali then hatches a scheme to produce a fake Osama video and sell it to news channels as a breakthrough scoop! Unfortunately there are serious ramifications as the White House gets involved and dispatches an overzealous secret agent on Ali Zafar’s trail.
Satire is an extremely potent weapon, and it isn’t really surprising that current Bollywood filmmakers would feel comfortable going into this comedic territory due to the dire, ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism to Indian society (as grimly evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai attacks). As Arun Venugopal wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Bollywood has been cranking out movies of various sorts on the subject of terrorism for the past several years – Kurbaan (2009), Black and White (2008) A Wednesday! (2008), My Name is Khan (2010) and Aamir (2008), just to name a few – while filmmakers in the West have been cowering under dark clouds of political correctness. And as we’ve been covering here at LFM, extremely funny hit indie films like The Infidel (see the LFM review), Four Lions and the award-winning web series Living With the Infidels have recently been ripping away the veil that’s been hovering over this subject … while Hollywood dithers, still trying to figure out what is politically ‘safe’ to say about terrorism.
We wish the filmmakers well with this new project. The film’s trailer is below.
By Jason Apuzzo. LFM contributor Joe Bendel recently reviewed the controversial and award-winning documentary 1428, which is currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival. 1428 depicts the botched and inhumane handling of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake by the Chinese communist regime.
Now comes word that another recent documentary about the Chinese government’s appalling mismanagement of a deadly earthquake – in this case, the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake that killed over 200,000 people – has been made available for free (in 12 parts) on YouTube. The title of this documentary from director Wang Libo is Buried (2009), and amazingly the film was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Beijing Documentary Film Festival.
Joe Bendel writes in his review of Buried that the film “methodically assembles a damning indictment of the Chinese government … Unless Wang fabricated Buried out of whole cloth, he presents an airtight case of government negligence and craven bureaucratic cya-ing.”
We encourage LFM readers to check out this extraordinarily courageous film from Wang Libo.
IN ADDITION … we wanted LFM readers to get a chance to see the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster, that was shown earlier this year on HBO. This utterly heartbreaking documentary film gives you a sense of what life is like under China’s brutal regime. You will see, for example, a parent’s official letter of ‘compensation’ after the Sichuan earthquake from the Chinese government: $317 for each dead child. It turns out, however, that even this ‘compensation’ is tied to a pledge to “obey the law and maintain social order.” Those willing to cooperate with the government (i.e., keep their mouths shut and stop complaining) have their ‘compensation’ packages upped to $8,800 per dead child.
Btw, I’m so glad Obama bowed to Chinese President Hu Jintao, aren’t you?
The filmmakers keep things mysterious, but the series appears to have as its premise a scenario that seems straight out of the new Red Dawn film, coming this fall from MGM. Some sort of massive occupying force – Chinese communist? Russian fascist? – invades and occupies America, and a hearty band of freedom fighter-rebels fight back.
