By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we posted about a forthcoming web series called Red Storm that looks exciting. Today we wanted to introduce LFM readers to another forthcoming web series that’s gotten a fair bit of pre-release hype, called The Mercury Men.
The Mercury Men is a 1940s-style adventure serial about a lowly government office drone who finds himself trapped, when deadly alien visitors from the planet Mercury seize his office building and use it as a staging ground for a nefarious plot. Aided by a daring aerospace engineer from a mysterious organization known as “The League,” the office drone must stop the invaders and their doomsday device, the Gravity Engine.
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 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. The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog reports today on a new documentary called Please Remove Your Shoes, about the troubled state of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA).
Please Remove Your Shoes follows the efforts of six whistleblower employees trying to fix what has obviously become – particularly in the wake of the Christmas bomber episode – an increasingly porous security situation at our nation’s airports.
According to the film’s website, the documentary “examines the period before 911 and the current situation nine years later and asks the questions that makes Washington squirm: ‘Are we really any better for all our money spent? Or is it safe to say that nothing has changed?'”
The driving force behind the project is retired pilot Fred Gevalt, who was himself flying a plane into New York on the morning of 9/11 – and was apparently 20 miles out of LaGuardia airport when the attack took place.
According to Speakeasy:
The final production, which Gevalt is self distributing July 1, asks viewers to evaluate if the TSA has truly made flying the friendly skies any safer post 9/11, and features interviews with Congressmen James Oberstar and John Mica (both of whom are on the Committee of Transportation and Infrastructure), as well as a number of former TSA and FAA employees. Gevalt adds that it wasn’t easy finding enough subjects to speak about their relationship with the TSA on the record, but as one interview beget another, “the business of access became less difficult.”
Does this make us safer?
In a review of the film by Manhattan Movie Magazine, Lita Robinson writes: “Through extensive interviews with ex-Air Marshals, government officials and reporters, this documentary examines the advent of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) in the wake of 9/11, painting a disturbing picture of waste, inefficiency, and abuse of power. The former Marshals, several of whom have specific expertise in aviation-based terrorism, describe a ‘nonexistent’ security system before 9/11, and a bureaucratic nightmare after.”
We’ve all become accustomed to the bizarre situation at our nation’s airports – a situation in which passengers are asked to perform something akin to a highly ritualized Japanese tea ceremony of removing our shoes, bowing respectfully before our superiors, and speaking in low, formalized tones professing our innocence (“No, I’m not carrying plastic explosives in my contact lens case”) … all the while never feeling that we’re any safer. If Mr. Gevalt’s film can in any way improve this situation – and improve our security – then we wish him the very best with it. It’s a pity to me that this documentary is being self-distributed, due to the extremely important subject matter – and the fact that the film appears to have good production values and feature credible experts on the situation. But such is typically the fate of whistleblowers who buck the system. Feel free to visit the film’s official website for more information.
