Four Lions

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When Four Lions came out it goes without saying that it stirred up a lot of controversy, there was little known of the film and I think a lot of people drew conclusions of the film before seeing it.

I went to see Four Lions at my local indie cinema, the likes of The Odeon would not ever touch this. The thing about Four Lions that is important is that you need to go into and indeed understand is that as much as this film is a satire it also deals with a lot of material and a lot of emotions in films that are not all about suicide and terrorists, these men were not terrorists that happened to be stupid, these men were the most badly organised group of men who happened to be terrorists.

When coming into a project like this Chris Morris had to be very careful and do everything right, he had to consider every angle and think about every line and he does that very well because if he did it wrong it could cause not just offence but it could cause a lot of people to want to take action. Morris did something rather amazing, when he screened it he did not screen it for the first time at London, LA or any number of high profile places but instead chose to screen it in Bradford here in the UK. Bradford has the biggest collective of Muslims in the whole of the UK and was very open and honest doing a Q&A after the film.

The plot is a group of men who get together the bomb the mosques, no, not the mosques, the internet, no hang on, you can't bomb the internet can you? So they choose the London Marathon as their main area to make the biggest impact, oh and they don't like Mini Babybell. It is a very simple plot and told like that and told in a way of four men looking to bomb something would scare many people and would not be a marketable film. But when you watch it you just can't take them seriously as people who can actually pull it off.

No-one gets off scot free in this, not the bombers, not the police not even the MI5. Chris Morris has always been on the side of equal opportunity offensiveness, either everything is okay or nothing is okay. I don't always believe in this philosophy but Morris does it so well I have to applaud him.

One other interesting thing is audience reaction. Certainly the screening I was in people didn't know if they should laugh, keep quiet or burst in hysterics. The last thing I would ever want to do is offend anyone but speaking with someone afterwards and we decided it was okay to laugh as long as you understand what it is that is being done.



Ghost In The Machine
Great film - dark humour - British indie movie-making at it's best.
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It should get more credit and more exposure. It did very well in the awards ceremonies, gets a respectable 7.3 on IMDb and a very well score of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and if you have ever used RT that is often a very hard score to get.



This is really a good film..So most of the delight of the film comes from these five varying ideologies clash with one another, particularly the brash Barry, who's just a militant assclown.!



This is really a good film..So most of the delight of the film comes from these five varying ideologies clash with one another, particularly the brash Barry, who's just a militant assclown.!
"shake your heads from side to side so the image is blurry on the cctv cameras!!" Barry really was a nasty piece of work!
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