The dark comedy
Four Lions
(2010)
by
Chris Morris
is brave, edgy, viciously satirical, disturbing and uncomfortable.
It portrays a group of British jihadis
as bumbling buffoons,
caught between two cultures,
heads full of nonsense,
and
planning random bombings for incoherent, illogical reasons.
Much like real life.
Satire:
There is a great scene at a university debate where two angry Muslims
complain about being profiled as terrorists.
Of course, both of them are terrorists!
This reminds me of the BBC program
"Don't Panic, I'm Islamic",
where some of those featured complaining of fear of Islam
turned out to be Islamic terrorists!
The jihadis' incoherent grievances and complaints make no sense
- just like any other group of poorly-educated young militants.
They reminded me of the
Baader Meinhof
gang
- moronic hand-waving about capitalism, McDonalds and "decadence"
means that violent young men can kill, kill, kill
to make it better.
There are some very funny lines.
One of the idiots compromises their mission by bringing a (drugged up) girl home,
with a house full of bomb-making gear on display.
One of the gang orders him to kill her.
He doesn't want to.
The other one says, in a brilliant summation of Islamist ideology towards women:
"You can fuck her but not kill her! What's wrong with you?"
It is also magnificent that the jihadis
communicate via cartoon avatars on a website called
"Puffin Party".
Disturbing:
The end is very disturbing, because despite their stupidity and their chaotic attack,
the jihadis do manage to kill infidels.
Again, like in real life.
In very disturbing scenes, one jihadi has a wife and little boy
who he fully shares his plans with.
He then goes and kills himself and others
in a chemists for no reason more coherent than that they sell condoms, or something.
He leaves his sweet little boy fatherless.
And God knows who else he killed in there - maybe a mother with a child.
We do not get to see.
The film manages to portray suicide bombing as comic
because it is so stupid.
These young men should have enjoyed life.
Instead they bombed a kebab shop and a chemist
and killed themselves
for no reason.
It doesn't get much more stupid than that.
The Case for Calling Them Nitwits, by Daniel Byman and Christine Fair, The Atlantic, July/Aug 2010 issue,
notes that many jihadis are indeed uneducated fools:
In Afghanistan, "the Taliban employ the world's worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself."
Comedy:
"In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honored tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests. According to several sources at the United Nations, as many as six would-be suicide bombers died last July after one such embrace in Paktika."
Bestiality:
"One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey. Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow."
Porn:
"Pentagon officials and intelligence analysts concede privately that our foes also have a voracious appetite for pornography ... Many laptops seized from the Taliban and al-Qaeda are loaded with smut."
The first proper Iraq War movie.
The first Iraq movie in which the Islamists are the bad guys.
The first film supporting the American troops in Iraq.
The first film supporting the British troops in Iraq.
At last, after
6 long years of anti-war propaganda films,
this is the first real Iraq War movie.
After 6 years of trying to help the enemy win during wartime,
Hollywood waits until America has won the war
before allowing the first movie
supporting the troops.
This is an excellent film by
Kathryn Bigelow.
A tense and realistic thriller.
Intensely atmospheric.
Sympathetic to the incredibly hard job the troops have,
without treating them like victims or sneering at their mission.
Portraying the jihadis as the disgusting human beings that they are.
We waited for the
"bait-and-switch",
and the
"sucker punch",
but refreshingly, it never came:
It was scary that it was written by
Mark Boal,
who wrote the article that
In the Valley of Elah
was based on.
But I couldn't see anything wrong with it.
It was also scary that it opened with a quote from
the anti-war cynic
Chris Hedges.
But the quote was something both supporters and opponents of the war could agree on,
and it never got worse after that.
Anything wrong with it? Not really, just that there is still room for many more types of
Iraq movies:
It does not really portray why the war is being fought.
It is a small, intimate portrait of soldiers.
No big-picture politics at all.
No discussion of what the struggle against Islamism means to the world.
There has yet to be any movie since 9/11 that discusses this.
The heroes mainly disarm bombs
rather than kill jihadis (though they do that too).
There is still room for a more traditional type of war movie,
focused on killing an evil enemy.
This was no 300.
There is plenty of room for more Iraq movies,
if Hollywood has the guts to make them.
I totally disagree with
John Nolte
on this one.
His criticisms are of minor points compared with most of the film.
It was no 300,
but I thought it was definitely the first pro-military Iraq movie.
More here
and here.
Likewise I disagree with
Alexander Marlow.
But he does have a good point:
"Why are these men in Iraq?"
was a question never discussed by the film (or any film).
The Hurt Locker Question, Andrew Klavan, 15 Jan 2010, also disagrees (politely) with John Nolte:
"The Hurt Locker, unlike every other War on Terror film I've seen, exists in a moral universe that a sane man might recognize as our own.
... it is, as Mark Hemingway wrote, "the best Iraq War movie ever made," though God knows that's not saying much."
Kathryn Bigelow's politics:
Does Kathryn Bigelow have good politics then?
Not really.
Her previous film was the morally dubious
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).
This was a sympathetic film about a Soviet Empire nuclear submarine crew in 1961,
as they cruised the seas
threatening the annihilation of London, New York
and other beautiful cities of the West
with nuclear missiles.
We were supposed to be happy
that these enemy fighters were rescued to carry on their evil work!
But wouldn't it have been better for the world if they had all died?
This film is roughly equivalent to a sympathetic film about the difficulties
encountered by the Iraqi resistance.
This is a strange film.
It's entertaining,
but the plot makes no sense and has a million holes.
On the good side,
the US are clearly the good guys.
The terrorists are the bad guys.
But it is never made clear
who exactly the terrorists are.
There are hints that they are Islamists, but it is never confirmed.
There is a back story about a threat from Moroccan Islamists,
but there are a lot of decoys and double bluffs in this film,
and it is never made clear if the Moroccan back story
is connected with the gang who actually carry out the attack here.
One of the gang has a wife in hijab, and carries out a suicide bombing,
but others (e.g. a girl in a flimsy top) seem very European and secular.
They never mention Allah, or jihad, or infidels,
even when talking among themselves.
The closest we get is one saying:
"This war will never end."
(What war?)
Debbie Schlussel
and
Libertas
think they are Islamists,
but I think it is left deliberately ambiguous.
I don't think it counts as a movie where the bad guys
are Islamists.
It's far too ambiguous.
This is a historic film.
It is the first movie since 9/11
with a fictional story
in which the bad guys are the modern Islamists.
It took 6 years, but Hollywood finally delivered one film.
And it is a quality action film.
Restrained, stylish, and beautifully shot.
The Americans are the good guys.
But with a convincing, sympathetic Saudi policeman and his colleagues among the heroes.
No jingoistic speeches.
No wisecracks as bad guys are killed.
The Saudis help the Americans not so much because they are pro-American
but because they are conservatives who despise jihadi anarchy.
The film is strongly
pro-American, but in a restrained, low-key way.
It has a really convincing, classic Islamist attack
- against defenceless civilians,
with a followup attack using a bomb-laden ambulance to kill
a huge number of rescue workers.
Classics of the Islamist way of war.
And no shit politics. None!
No dumb, trite messages at the start or the end. None!
Some people on the right thought the fact that both sides in the film said
"Don't worry - We're going to kill them all"
was some sort of statement of moral equivalence.
But I didn't get that at all.
It was just a statement of reality.
The jihad wants to kill all infidels - men, women and children.
And the good guys want (or should want) to kill all jihadi fighters
(rather than, say, address their grievances).
What is the problem?
One for the Good Guys: An action thriller that approaches reality, by John Podhoretz, 8 Oct 2007.
He likes The Kingdom, and brilliantly mocks Hollywood's previous efforts:
"Unfortunate moviegoers who have suffered through Hollywood's recent efforts to make geopolitical sense of the Middle East may spend some of the running time watching this new suspense thriller .. with a sense of looming dread. Surely, any moment, there will be a scene in which it is revealed that the bombing of an American housing compound in Saudi Arabia ... was not the work of Islamofascist terrorists but rather of an evil oil company. Or the U.S. government. Or militant Christians ...
who are killing Americans to try and start a holy war with Muslims""The great surprise of The Kingdom is that it does not take this approach at all
- which is why, among other things, it is going to be embraced by Americans who will be thrilled by its unapologetic depiction of a heroic crew of stateside good guys going into Saudi Arabia in pursuit of those who slaughter innocent Americans in Allah's name.".
I was pleasantly surprised by this.
It's a well-made film about the torment suffered by Pearl's family and friends.
I'm not sure it counts as a movie where the bad guys
are Islamists, though,
because, believe it or not, there are no bad guys.
At least, not on the screen.
The Islamists that kidnapped and killed Pearl never appear on screen.
Only a few shots of their associates.
We never see Pearl in captivity.
We do not see them behead him.
We do not see the video of it
that is online:
We do not see them dismember him.
We see no jihadi actions on screen at all.
They all take place off-screen.
It's a well-made film.
But it feels as if there is some bizarre and extreme self-censorship making a hole
in the middle of it.
The movie
contains shots of Pakistani police torturing a jihadi,
and TV clips of jihadis in Guantanamo.
And yet not a single clip of the jihadis in action.
It's very odd.
Some have thought the message of the other clips was one of
moral equivalence - that both sides are as bad as each other.
But I didn't get that.
It was very understated if that was the message.
The film seemed pretty anti-jihadi to me.
So I don't agree with
Debbie Schlussel's review, May 24, 2007,
that the film was trying to find excuses for the jihadis.
But I do agree that it was an odd film.
"instead of scenes of Muslims beating, interrogating, torturing, beheading, and dissecting Daniel Pearl, we see Muslim Asra Nomani crying and anguishing over Danny. We see Muslim police officers very concerned about Pearl."
I'm sure many secular and liberal Muslims in Pakistan did anguish about Pearl,
and tried to help.
But to show them and not show the Islamist execution and mutilation
seems like an act of evasion.
Why not show the whole world, warts and all, instead of a sanitised version?
As usual, the Internet provides
a much more shocking reality:
The image of
the jihadi holding up Pearl's severed head
is one of the iconic images of this
war against utter evil.
It is a symbol of what the global jihad will do to all of us
if it wins.
Maybe cinema could not show this.
But why did it have to be so sanitised?
Libertas blog:
"The only "terrorist" behavior shown on screen is done by our side. Our government teams up with the Pakistan anti-terrorism squad to find Pearl and along the way the "good" guys torture, threaten, and even talk about how much they enjoy it. We only see Daniel Pearl through photographs sent by his kidnappers. Their treatment of him is never dramatized and Winterbottom doesn't even bother to let us hear Pearl's execution videotape, much less see it."
The film made very little money, and perhaps the decision not to
dramatize Pearl's murder (or even his kidnapping!)
is the reason why.
Libertas blog:
"Is it unreasonable to wonder if the failure of A Mighty Heart is due to an agenda-driven approach to the film? What else explains the conscious decision to not let us feel something for Daniel Pearl? ... To not dramatize his ordeal or let us get a sense of his suffering? To only show our side brutalizing others?
It's all so cold and efficient you have to wonder if the people involved in crafting it weren't so worried about ginning up support for the War on Terror that they decimated their own film"
The first proper cinema-released movie about 9/11.
The first cinema-released movie about the War.
The first cinema-released movie since 9/11 in which the bad guys are the modern Islamists.
It took nearly 5 years,
but at last we have a single cinema-released movie about the war.
What a bunch of cowards Hollywood are.
To be precise, it took 4 years and 9 months.
If the same absurd leftist McCarthyism had prevailed in Hollywood in WW2,
then the first movie about the war
would have come out in Sept 1946.
This movie is not bad.
Not a masterpiece.
It is brilliant on capturing the confusion of that day,
the totally unexpected, unbelievable nature of the attack,
and the sheer innocence of the targets.
It captures that "Sept 10th" feeling.
But it doesn't capture the raw emotions of that day remotely as well as
the TV movie Flight 93.
But still, what a breakthrough for cinema.
It is the film Hollywood has been
terrified
to make ever since 9/11.
Not a masterpiece. But it's a start.
United 93 cost $15 million to make, and grossed $76 million.
In a historic time, when there is only one great story, and all of cinema is
terrified
to deal with it, this movie deals with it head on.
This movie captures the raw emotions of that day far better than United 93.
And yet it never made it to cinema,
while a thousand worthless turkeys did.
Clip from Flight 93 (2006),
without doubt the best movie about the war since 2001.
See more clips.
And search
and search.
The first proper movie since 9/11 in which the bad guys are Islamists.
Steven Spielberg (like everyone else in Hollywood)
ignores the modern war:
Memo to Spielberg: We're facing a "War of the Worlds"
by Diana West, September 13, 2004
- Spielberg is honoured for his movies on World War 2:
Schindler's List
and
Saving Private Ryan.
His new movie is on the fictional
War of the Worlds.
And yet we are in World War 4,
and Spielberg and everyone else in Hollywood is ignoring it:
"But no "cinema" - not by Spielberg, not by anyone -
is recalling anything, utterable or not, about the colossal struggle of our age.
There is no cultural echo chamber in which this conflict finds resonance."
War Of The Worlds,
Mark Steyn, The Spectator, July 9th 2005
- "Hollywood is in the middle of its worst box-office slump in decades.
...
And no one can quite figure out why this should be.
...
my theory on why the box-office is down: in 'interesting times',
Hollywood is making films about nothing.
...
Spielberg's War of the Worlds
is a lavish nullity: the industry's slump is set to continue."
But in fairness he then makes an important movie.
It's still not about the modern war, but it is a modest breakthrough:
OK I finally got to see it.
It was a good film dramatically, but I didn't believe a word of it.
None of it rang true to me,
and left me convinced that those who doubt Yuval Aviv's story are right.
Getting their information from a mysterious French family,
the CIA protecting a target,
members of the team being stalked and killed (and not replaced!),
the Mossad agents alone and abandoned by the agency,
the Mossad and Palestinians sharing the same safe house,
the endless agonising by the agents over the ethics of killing Palestinian terrorists
- none of it felt true to me.
It would never have been like that.
It is disputed by many people
(including the former head of Mossad)
that Yuval Aviv was ever in Mossad at all:
So I thought it was all pure fiction. But did I enjoy it? Yes, I thought it was quite good.
Critics said it was full of
leftist moral ambiguity about counter-terrorism.
Yes there was a bit, but not a huge amount.
The Israelis were still the good guys.
They were shown trying to avoid civilians,
while the Palestinians were shown targeting civilians.
Critics also said the film promotes the
popular idea
that Israel's response to terror may have led to more terror (including 9/11).
But I didn't get that from the film at all.
No, I liked it, though it felt like pure fiction.
And why do I say it is "a modest breakthrough"?
Simply because, even though it is not about the modern war,
this is
the first major movie since the Islamist killings on 9/11
where the bad guys are actually Islamists.
OK looking back,
it is a crap film.
I guess I was desperate for anything at all to portray Islamism,
the great taboo topic in Hollywood.
It was the first major movie after 9/11 where the bad guys were Islamists.
But it's still a crap film.
Hollywood had no idea how to deal with 9/11
and the new war with Islamism in 2001.
The last thing it wanted to do was support the war.
Shockingly, this was the only movie at all about the war in 2001-05
(albeit a comedy).
Contrast with the
dozens of supportive WW2 films
Hollywood pumped out in 1941-45
(and even before and after).
A hilarious attack on
Michael Moore, ignorant
Hollywood celebrities
and
the anti-war left.
Well, it's not quite the pro-war movie we're looking for,
but it's something.
It's a tiny bit of relief
while we wait for a decent movie about the war.
And it actually has the bravery to slag off
a genuine dictator, the genocidal butcher
Kim Jong Il
of North Korea,
who - unlike Bush - actually kills people who offend him.
Slagging off Bush is safe and risk-free.
Slagging off a real, living dictator takes guts.
Team America cost $32 million to make, and grossed $51 million.
Gary's famous speech
at the end of Team America: World Police.
"We're dicks!
...
And Kim Jong Il is an asshole.
...
But dicks also fuck assholes. Assholes who just want to shit on everything.
...
I don't know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole
..."
Such delicious disrespect to
a real-life living murderer.
(2010)
by
Chris Morris
is brave, edgy, viciously satirical, disturbing and uncomfortable.
Some people on the right thought the fact that both sides in the film said
"Don't worry - We're going to kill them all"
was some sort of statement of moral equivalence.
But I didn't get that at all.
It was just a statement of reality.
The jihad wants to kill all infidels - men, women and children.
And the good guys want (or should want) to kill all jihadi fighters
(rather than, say, address their grievances).
What is the problem?
Since 1995.
