By Jason Apuzzo. I am very pleased to report that a movie we loved here at Libertas – Chris Morris’ Islamic terror satire Four Lions – has just picked up U.S. distribution. We’ve been covering the progress of this film for months, and we’re so happy that Alamo Drafthouse – a great cult movie distribution outfit (for DVDs) that will now be entering theatrical distribution under the banner of Drafthouse Films – has selected Four Lions as its first theatrical venture. Four Lions will apparently be kicking off a 10 city promotional screening tour with Chris Morris in mid-October, and the film is otherwise slated for release this fall in New York, Los Angeles and Austin – with other cities in following weeks. This is great news.
We got a chance to see Four Lions at the LA Film Festival a few months ago, and we thought it was fantastic. [Read my review of Four Lions here.] We also had fun meeting actor Kayvan Novak, who plays the clueless ‘Waj’ in the film. After Four Lions’ big debut at Sundance, the film closed the South by Southwest Film Festival, won the Independent Camera Award at Karlovy Vary – and was voted Best Narrative Feature by audiences at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
Having been at one of those LA Film Fest screenings, I can tell you that the place rocked. Why? Because Four Lions breaks all the rules and says things that need to be said about contemporary Islamic terror … but are never allowed to be said in current Hollywood cinema.
As we’ve been reporting here for months, Four Lions is part of a recent wave of narrative films that are finally starting to look honestly at the phenomenon of Islamic terror … and doing so through the subversive medium of humor. Joining Four Lions in this new wave are Omid Djalili’s absolutely hilarious new film The Infidel (see our review of it here), the popular British web series “Living with the Infidels” (see our review of that here), and … am I allowed to mention this? … my own film Kalifornistan, which will be opening the Free Thinking Film Festival on November 12th.
The most obvious thing to say about this phenomenon is that all of these are indie projects. Studios still won’t touch this subject. Frankly, I don’t expect that to change. My sense is that Hollywood feels the War on Terror winding down, and is simply going to sit it out on the sidelines and let the indies take care of this stuff.
That’s fine by me. We don’t need the studio people ruining our fun.
[UPDATE: You can read a great interview with Drafthouse’s CEO Tim League here. His outfit will be distributing Four Lions here in the U.S.]
Posted on September 9th, 2010 at 12:26pm.
i like the look of this but i’m having trouble with the accents. was that an issue when you saw it?
It’s funny you mention that because the print I saw actually had subtitles on it, because of the thick Cockney accents. Personally I didn’t need them, but it’s probably a good idea because of how fast the guys talk.
I’m normally in sympathy with your take on cinema but I have to say your continued support for this film baffles the heck out of me.
As a Briton, I am perhaps more familiar than you with Morris’s past work and, most importantly, with how he positions himself within the broader culture. To British viewers, for whom the trivialising of important subjects in a comedic context is a banal regularity, rather than the rarity it is elsewhere, the basically leftist nature of the film is perhaps more evident. Believe me, if the film were simply an attack on the absurdity of Islamic radicalism it would have been as impossible to finance here as anywhere. It was supported by our metropolitan elite precisely because it was not intended as a satire on the absurdity of Islamic radicalism per se, but rather on how that absurdity is overplayed and mishandled by the world at large. To me, the film is a smug and complacent piece of work which, when not striving grotesquely for pathos in its treatment of the central characters, mocks those of us who would see Islamism as a major global threat.
What I find harder still to understand, though not as surprising, is why Americans continue to find modern British comedy funny. Far more than by its antagonistic and spiteful tone, I was offended by the third-rate old hat absurdist humour. Even Morris can do way, way better than this.
Again, perhaps it just comes down to relative lack of exposure and the persistence against all reason of the myth that British comedy is more sophisticated. Either way, count yourself lucky.
Matthew – I’m extra busy at the moment but I’m going to give you a detailed response to your remarks later today. Thanks for your engagement here.
Matthew – apologies for getting back to you so late. Let me make several points in response:
• Forgive my reflexive American pride, but I have never assumed that British film comedy is either more sophisticated than the American variety (who could more sophisticated than, say, America’s own Paddy Chafesky? or early Woody Allen?), or more amusing for that matter. My championing of Four Lions really had little to do with my perceptions of contemporary British comedy at all, really – I don’t watch enough of it to form an opinion.
• I have no doubt that you’re more familiar with Morris’ work than I am. However, if the British ‘metropolitan elites’ are under the impression that Four Lions is a satire on our perceptions of terrorism – rather than on terrorism itself – than they are surely being too clever by a half, and have rather drastically misread the film. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Four Lions mercilessly satirizes terrorists, to a degree that is really quite striking – and, I suspect, at least modestly debilitating to the terrorist cause in the UK. I must confess to having missed completely the element of ‘pathos’ in this film. ‘Pathos,’ to me, summons up imagery far different than what we’re treated to in this film: i.e., slapstick sequences involving terror attacks in Mutant Ninja Turtles costumes, crows destroyed by faulty detonators, etc.
I take the ‘basically leftist nature’ of the film – as you put it – to inhere in the very treatment of this subject matter with humor? On that point I really must disagree with you. The last thing the average street-thug terrorist wants is to be treated as a moron, a misguided goofball. These guys prefer their public image to be one of warriors in a sanctified cause. That’s hardly what Morris gives them. He basically just gives them chicken suits and ‘rubber dingy rapids.’
• Here in the States there is striking uniformity on one point with regard to this film: that it makes contemporary Islamic terrorists look like fools. If Morris intended the film to provide some type of meta-commentary on our ‘perceptions’ of terrorism, then I think he’s more or less failed at that. But the film leads me to believe that this probably was not his intention. It really just comes across to me as an acerbic, uncompromising satire on a tough subject. [And, I might add, I’ve read quite a few British reviews that agree with that assessment of the film.]
Thanks for your engagement here, Matthew.
What I found novel, revolutionary even, in such a contemporary feature film, is the utter lack of any sanctimonious prattle about how the religion has been hijacked by ‘misunderstanders’ or how we should all try to get along. Instead, the film presents the more realistic view that only the degree of Islamic perniciousness differs. As for Matthew’s comment that the film “mocks those of us who would see Islamism as a major global threat”, I find that hard to fathom considering that even those idiots killed at least a dozen people in the film.
Yes, VW, that’s what struck me, too: how completely unsentimental the film is about the Islamic terrorist cause. I mean, Morris gives them nothing … absolutely nothing in the way of ‘justification’ for what they do.
Actually that’s not quite true: what he does ‘give’ them is merciless ridicule.
On a personal note, I can tell you that I felt kind of alone when I made Kalifornistan(!). I sometimes had the feeling that I was going way, way out on a limb in what we were saying in that picture. I was so glad to see Four Lions, The Infidel and Living with the Infidel (that little short series was, in its own small way, an important impetus for restarting Libertas), because I suddenly had the feeling that other people in the indie film world were thinking some of the same things I was thinking about the terrorist situation. So I’m glad that other people will now be getting the chance to see Morris’ great work.
I don’t want to labour this, as I’m obviously not going to change your mind, and I don’t want to get your back up as your site is one of my favourites.
I’m heartened, too, to see that our disagreement as to whether the film is even remotely amusing on its own terms comes down to a genuine difference in taste – and not, on your part, a reflection of the widespread and distressing habit of many Americans to embrace our horseshit unfunny comedy in a self-denigrating way. (So anti-American and disdainful is our dominant popular culture that many ‘Americans abroad’ fall into the trap of pandering to its attitudes, rather than decrying their bigotry. Americans really do apologise for being American over here.) But we get this kind of naturalistic-absurdist comedy here every night, and the cynicism and smugness of it palls – give me Cheers any day.
But I wish I could change your mind about Morris and his motives. Again, I appeal to you to look to his track record: he is usually described as a ‘media terrorist’ and his specialism is comedy of wild offensiveness in which it is impossible to discern any cogent moral position. A spoof tv documentary on paedophilia provoked national press and public outrage over its aristocratic contempt for people’s fears and certainties, and the seeming nihilism of its position. Like much of his work, it was often very funny, but truly shocking in that it its only point seemed to be to trivialise. He shocks for shock’s sake, and leaves it to his media class admirers to concoct the case for the defence. He’s a slippery character.
You write: “I must confess to having missed completely the element of ‘pathos’ in this film” and that “it makes contemporary Islamic terrorists look like fools.” But the main bomber isn’t an idiot; he’s a realistically presented and acted character with whose complexity we are meant to sympathise and engage, and there are a number of scenes with his wife and child, and brother-in-law, that are played for poignancy and empathy. The film also strives to portray the police, rapid response forces and interrogators as equally stupid.
Morris has gone out of his way to stress (disingenuously in my view) that the film is not a satire on any particular belief system, and while characteristically dismissive of objections from the relatives of terrorist victims, he tellingly sent the script to Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg before production to ask if there was anything in it “that would be offensive to British Muslims”. The implication, presumably, being that if he thought there was Morris would have altered it.
He also wrote a notorious article before production for the leftist newspaper The Observer in which he attacked Christopher Hitchens’s anti-Islamist writings and called Martin Amis “the new Abu Hamza”. This article – intended I suspect to deflect Muslim objections to his forthcoming project – is eye-opening indeed, and I urge you to Google it.
That’s all I’ll say, thanks for indulging me, and at the risk of sounding like a cracked record, let me repeat how much I enjoy your splendid website.
Matthew, thanks so much for your very cogent and friendly reply. I appreciate it. Time constraints, unfortunately, force me to limit myself to just a few points … but thanks so much for engaging with our site.
• My familiarity with Morris’ work is limited – and some of the things you mention are, indeed, very much cause for concern. What I ask you to imagine, however, is the context in which this film will be hitting American shores: we get almost nothing over here that deals with the terror issue, except in the form of an apologia for Islamic extremism. You can’t imagine how different Four Lions appears to us, when what we’re accustomed to is, say, something like Syriana. Or when Oliver Stone makes a film about the attacks called World Trade Center that altogether eliminates any reference to terrorism! Four Lions seems like such a breath of fresh air, by comparison.
• With respect to the film’s central character, I think his lunacy was depicted in a more subtle manner than with the others. What I found especially chilling were the domestic scenes with his wife, in which the terrorist cause is blended seamlessly into the rhythms of ‘normal,’ suburban middle class life. I actually thought Morris’ satire was best there, especially in the wife’s bland acceptance of what her husband was doing. And my sense is that Morris did intend that as satire, albeit of an extremely black variety.
• I accept your concerns about the nihilistic tendencies in British pop culture right now – as I’ve gotten a taste of that from time to time in my travels. At the same time, what we struggle with over here in the States is a kind of maudlin, sugary sentimentality that gets spread over everything in our popular entertainment … in contrast to which the British tartness is sometimes a nice corrective. Just a thought.
All the best to you and thanks for writing in.
Thank to your incessant trumpeting of this film, Jason, I quickly grabbed it off the ‘New Arrivals’ shelf at the DVD rental and watched it today. It was brilliant! But it ‘defo’ needed subtitles, man. Four Lions, is to me, the ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ of the new millennium. I’ve been rewatching certain scenes and LMAO every time. So, thank you, Jason and the Libertas crew. I wouldn’t have heard of the film otherwise.
Awesome! So glad you liked it.