Spaff

Happy News Year: Chris Morris's film about terrorists finally has funding \o/

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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/article1228152.ece;jsessionid=F0AA8BFEB23189F845B8821F465EC29A?postingType=complaint&parentId=1229433&mode=thanks&postingId=1229668

Wannabe suicide bombers beware: Chris Morris movie gets go-ahead

chris-morris_109560t.jpg

Chris Morris has been criticised for previous satires such as Brass Eye

He has persuaded MPs to campaign to keep the fictitious drug "cake" off the streets, and musician Phil Collins to warn children against paedophiles while wearing a "Nonce Sense" T-shirt. Now the satirist Chris Morris is tackling his most controversial topic yet: wannabe suicide bombers.

Morris's film, which has the working title Four Lions, explores the "farce" of terrorism and is funded by FilmFour. It goes into production this summer, after a year of delays caused by funding difficulties over fears that it was too contentious, and is expected to be in cinemas by the end of the year. The production company Warp Films said the film, which Morris spent three years researching, "understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous."

Deirdre Steed, who worked with Morris to secure funding for the film, said the satirist, who fronted The Day Today and Brass Eye, has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims to research the film.

"Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce," she said. "At training camps, young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other's feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says 'what was the question again?' On Millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank."

Ms Steed said terrorist cells share the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side football teams. "There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry," she said. "Terrorism is about ideology, but it's also about berks.

"Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis."

The project, which Morris has described as showing the "Dad's Army side to terrorism", has suffered a year of delays, and was refused funding as a television project by the BBC, amid speculation that the subject was too controversial. But Morris remained determined that it should go into production. He asked the public to show their support by offering £25 towards the funding of the film, in return for the chance to be an extra in the comedy.

Then, on 30 October, Morris announced to fans: "We've had some good funding news which means we won't be asking you to back your generous offer with hard cash."

FilmFour confirmed it will be backing the film and yesterday said it will be produced this year. A spokeswoman said Morris had always envisaged the project as a feature film rather than a piece for television and that FilmFour "had been involved from the beginning of the development process".

Morris has previously acknowledged that "some may find poking fun at terrorists offensive". But, he said: "Most of us would dearly love to laugh in the face of our worst fears. Why aren't we laughing at terrorists? Because we don't know how to, until now."

Edited by Spaff

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God I love The Day Today and Brass Eye. This will be like a thousand hugs.

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I LOVED Brass Eye. I LOVED Blue Jam/Jam... but the Brass Eye Special just wasn't as funny/effective as the original series (even though it needed to be made). Bushwhacked was a less funny version of videos already available on the internet. I haven't seen # My Wrongs #8245 - 8249 & 117 or Nathan Barley, but I've heard some very mixed things about them.

It's sad to say, but I'm just not as excited by new Chris Morris as I used to be.

If I were to over-analyse his recent public appearance that was bootlegged, this may sound absurd but... They say that every good satirist is a frustrated optimist and well, he just sounded miserable and pessimistic to me. Has father time corrupted him?

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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Nathan Barley can be a little broard at times but it's still very funny. You owe it to yourself to at least give it a try.

My Wrongs is perhaps a little pretentious and not nearly as good as the Blue Jam sketch it was based on but I still enjoyed it. You can probably give it a miss unless you're a Chris Morris completionist.

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Yeah, I'd like to give them both a shot, really, but as you can tell - I'm not chomping at the bit. Which is a shame. I'll put Barley on my DVD rental list.

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I'm cautiously optimistic, having watched Brass Eye again over Christmas. I thought the special was just as good as the rest of the series :tup:

Nathan Barley meanders a little and

has quite a bitter end

, but it was fairly good.

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Yeah, I like the special too. Although IIRC it didn't have those fantastic overblown visuals.

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I enjoyed the Brass Eye special just as much as the rest of the show. Maybe this has to do with my watching it basically back to back with the actual series, instead of waiting for years for more Morris, and building expectation and then merely getting... a good solid episode of Brass Eye. (Which is what it is.)

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I LOVED Brass Eye. I LOVED Blue Jam/Jam... but the Brass Eye Special just wasn't as funny/effective as the original series (even though it needed to be made).

false, well to me anyways - if anything I'd say it's even more effective than the others, especially for the way in which the British media took hold of it and made it headline news, basically hammering every single point discussed into people's faces in exactly the way it was surely intended to do, in a horribly ironic way.

Bushwhacked was a less funny version of videos already available on the internet.

I dunno if that's true, I think it might pre-date them, but also the version set to music with Osymyso was awesome. :)

I haven't seen # My Wrongs #8245 - 8249 & 117 or Nathan Barley, but I've heard some very mixed things about them.

false.

ok not false, see below though

It's sad to say, but I'm just not as excited by new Chris Morris as I used to be.

please don't make me sad! - this news makes me happy, it's the first good news of 2009 for poor appendixless, jobless me! :violin:

If I were to over-analyse his recent public appearance that was bootlegged, this may sound absurd but... They say that every good satirist is a frustrated optimist and well, he just sounded miserable and pessimistic to me. Has father time corrupted him?

Don't forget his horrible role in that dreadful fucking shitstorm of an embarassment - the IT Crowd, ugghhh it makes me shudder.

Anyways... my wrongs, which is maybe 5/6 years old now, was based on a blue jam monologue, and doesnt work as well as it did when it was just a rambling set of words falling from chris's mouth.

Nathan Barley suffered from not having Morris in it at all (well he's in one tiny background video) and coming too many years after taking the piss out of new media was no longer amusing...

Also, if you watch the pilot, it was clear they had a different initial plan, to make Barley the hated 'cunt' that he was designed to be, and to make the character of Dan look down on them and be generally better than all these 'cunts'... but for some unknown reason they made it so that you empathised with Barley. That was a game changing folly....

The failure of Barley is similar in my mind to the My Wrongs thing, in that part of the genius was in the over the top way it was described in words, which was then lost when filmed - the details of Barley's cunthood were described in such detail, specific model numbers of hardware he had, or brands of clothing taking up much of the description of the episodes...

tvgohome10121999.jpg

tvgohome03112000.jpg

tvgohome20082001.jpg

tvgohome10102001.jpg

See, there's no way to convey that properly in a visual way...

( read the rest of the original Charlie Brooker / probably Morris efforts from TV Go Home here: http://www.thegestalt.org/simon/cunt/ )

AAAaaannnyways, I welcome the return of Morris, and I'd like to see what he has to offer us. He's been an incredibly important part of my life for many years, and I don't think this is going to be another Brass Eye or On The Hour, but I am excited none-the-less.

:tup:

Edited by Spaff

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Yeah, I like the special too. Although IIRC it didn't have those fantastic overblown visuals.

haha no instead is has the amazingly underplayed and dramatic intro text, which is so tiny on the screen you can hardly see it, whcih then explodes in a tiny mushroom cloud, and then continues to animate for about 20 seconds too long

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=y7jVnrfoZD8

(1:15 in)

Edited by Spaff

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Hmmm. It's so weird that so many of you like the Special as much the main series. For my money it just wasn't anywhere NEAR as funny as the original series. I watched it for the first time straight after watching the series, so it was back to back. As far as I'm concerned, the best Brass Eye was the last of the series (Noel Edmunds going crazy and shooting Clive Anderson - still makes me smile thinking about it).

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=W8X38AptH9s

For me, Brass Eye was at its best when it was so outrageously over-the-top about serious issues. The anti-drugs charity called F.U.K.D.N.B.O.M.D -- and no-one noticed or said anything. In fact, anyone even responding to the "charity" was worth laughing at, it was so ridiculous.

The whole absurdity of "Cake" and the music they listen to. I remember Peter Baynam recalling asking Morris what he was going to do with the massive yellow block of "cake" he had in his hands.

"Oh, I'm going to tell them this is Cake."

"You mean a model of what Cake looks like?"

"No, I'm going to tell them that this is the real thing. They take one nibble, go into a drug frenzy and have to shove the rest in."

Wonderful! Anyone who fell for that deserves to be laughed at, especially when they're espousing a "serious message" to viewers.

In the Special, however, I seem to remember that the fake letterheads weren't that OTT at all, and that it would be perfectly reasonable for people take them seriously - instead of insanely, rapturously funny.

*shrugs*

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My favourite episode of Brass Eye is always the one I've seen most recently. There's always something in each episode which I will have forgotten about that is so perfectly funny that that episode goes to the top of my list. The most recent example was in Decline where there's a guy smoking crack in a board meeting and completely over does it. That had me in stiches.

Concerning the special, how is Dr Fox saying

Genetically, paedophiles have more in common with crabs than you or I. That's scientific fact. There's no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact.

not so stupid it's just as hilariously over the top as any of the other episodes?

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or the paedophile dressed as a school....

the paedo sent into space with a child accidentally left on board being 'the one thing we didn't want to happen'

the false advert break about paedophile island and the paedo files which cased a billion complaints to channel 4 because they thought it was real.

etc :)

aaanyway

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or the paedophile dressed as a school....

That was from Decline, not the special, IIRC.

the paedo sent into space with a child accidentally left on board being 'the one thing we didn't want to happen'

Wasn't this in the main series, too?

If so, the defence rests, m'lud.

Either way, this discussion is a great excuse for me to watch them all again :tup:

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The cake bit bored me :/

The cake episode is maybe my favourite. It's even funnier when you know that the MP really did bring it up in the House of Commons (which lead to the enquiry into Chris Morris which lead to the delay of the TV Special).

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Paedophile in space

Paedophile disguised as school

Both from the first three minutes of the special, I'm afraid. The latter is followed by a favourite line of a friend and mine: "We must catch this man, he really is a shit."

I think I actually prefer the special, although that might just be because I'm impressed by the newer and fancier production values. I am, after all, an utter imbecile. I even have tolerance for the IT Crowd, so apparently you can pretty much disregard everything I say. Except for those two links, which are indisputable facts.

I enjoy most of Morris' efforts, including the recent ones, but then read online that they're all wrong and not good at all, which makes me doubt my own opinion and become a bit depressed about the whole affair, because I'm a incapable of forming any decisions of my own. Then I watch them again and decide I do kind of like them after all. But maybe that is just the desperate desire not to be disappointed. Maybe I'm just deluding myself. OH GOD, WHATEVER WILL I DO.

Which is why I tend to avoid places like Cook'd and Bomb'd. Oh, that's also because forums tend to eat up monstrous chunks of my time. I'm bad at managing that sort of thing. Wait, is this a forum? OH SHIT.

In conclusion: Facts.

EDIT: Oh shit, now this post is completely pointless. You know, as opposed to mostly.

Edited by JamesM

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In the Special, however, I seem to remember that the fake letterheads weren't that OTT at all, and that it would be perfectly reasonable for people take them seriously - instead of insanely, rapturously funny.

*shrugs*

Absolute N.O.N.C.E. S.E.N.S.E. :)

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JamesM - cookdandbombd seem to basically hate everything that isnt Wayne Carr, so ignore them :)

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JamesM - cookdandbombd seem to basically hate everything that isnt Wayne Carr, so ignore them :)

An oldish friend of mine described it as a "hate shrine".

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