Four Lions
Director: Chris Morris (100 min.)
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Arsher Ali, Nigel Lindsay, Kayvan Novak, Adeel Akhtar
Headline: A cel of hapless British terrorists argues over what they should explode
Indie type: Talky, taboo comedy
Report: If veteran British comedy writer/performer Chris Morris has passed along one guiding principle to the collective of bright comic minds he’s worked with over the past decade-plus, it’s this: Commit to the bit, even if you risk being unfunny. Morris’ feature directorial debut Four Lions is frequently funny—guffaw-worthy even—but if I tried to pitch this coal-black satire as a laugh riot, I’d be misleading you. (Although I’ll add that it might help if you live in the UK, and can pick up all the cultural references the movie drops; I missed about 30% of them at least.) And if I described the movie (as I sort-of-do above) as a wacky comedy about a bunch of British/Islamist terrorists, that would be pointing you in the wrong direction too. Like most Morris projects (The Day Today and Brass Eye being the prime examples), Four Lions weaves between the disarmingly outlandish and the alarmingly true-to-life. The movie’s terrorists are an eclectic bunch: a middle-class cynic with a wife and kid, a superstitious fundamentalist, an aging activist, a dim mischief-maker and a good-hearted go-along guy. Four Lions shows enough of these men that we get to like them a little—or at least to enjoy their company—and to hope that maybe they’re just incompetent enough to end the movie without blowing anything up. But alas, there’s that whole “commit to the bit” bugaboo again. As Four Lions moves to its big finish, Morris and his company of top-flight comic actors fuse farce with real worry, and not always seamlessly. (I for one never bought that the Moe of our group of Jihadist Stooges was as into the cause as he professed.) There’s a raggedness to Four Lions that makes it hard to recommend unreservedly. It’s no masterpiece. But more often than not, it is pretty brilliant. Grade: B+
Frozen
Director: Adam Green (93 min.)
Cast: Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore, Kevin Zegers
Headline: Three skiers, one lift, one chilly night
Indie type: Constrained suspense
Report: How’s this for a gimmick? Three college students (two buddies and a girlfriend) take an impromptu ski trip and through a chain of unfortunate circumstances (largely caused by the kids’ own obstinacy and sense of privilege) wind up stuck on a ski lift, at a resort that’s going to be closed for the next five days. What resources can they draw on, to stay alive and/or get themselves rescued? That’s a great question for any thriller to ask—especially one that confines its action more or less to a single location. But the problem with Frozen is that we know the thing is 90 minutes long, and we know that our trio won’t be rescued right away, so a lot of the movie's “Hey, let’s give this a try!” set-pieces lack a necessary tension. The other problem? While the actors are game, their characters are pretty generic, which means that the long scenes of them sitting in the cold and talking about their lives are Downtown Dullsville. Frozen does take a few unexpected turns—the biggest one involving the arrival of hungry wolves—and Green does know how to construct a suspense sequence. He just needs to find a way to put those sequences into a movie that has its own organic life, and isn’t so… well, please consult the title. Grade: C+
Buried
Director: Rodrigo Cortés (94 min.)
Cast: Ryan Reynolds
Headline: One man, one coffin, two hours
Indie type: Constrained suspense
Report: No wait, how’s this for a gimmick? Buried opens with a contract truck driver (played by Ryan Reynolds) lying in a sand-covered coffin in an Iraq desert. In the box with him: a lighter, a cell phone and a few other goodies waiting to be discovered. For the next 90 minutes, we watch Reynolds make and field calls, in hopes of getting found—or of appeasing the natives who kidnapped and buried him in the first place. Outside of a couple of pictures and videos that appear on the phone, Reynolds’ face is the only one we see, and the coffin is pretty much the only set. Director Rodrigo Cortés makes good use of the limited space, although there are times when it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. As for Chris Sparling’s script, it’s cleverly constructed, filling in the details of Reynolds’ situation (and his life back home) in the midst of the action. There should be a little more to the backstory than there is—and more to the movie than a familiar critique of the management of the Iraq War—but Reynolds is terrific, and Cortés and Sparling overlay a preposterous premise with familiar modern complaints. Buried is as much about dropped calls, getting sent to voicemail, and being openly lied to by our institutions as it about being buried alive by terrorists. Grade: B
The Tillman Story
Director: Amir Bar-Lev (94 min.)
Documentary
Headline: Government lies; world keeps turning
Indie type: Exposé doc
Report: The title for this well-researched, deeply moving retelling of the Pat Tillman saga is fine as it is, since it does refer to the attempts to turn the “friendly fire” death of the former NFL star and Army ranger into pro-enlistment myth-making. But the original title was even better: I'm Pat _______ Tillman. That title alludes to Tillman’s reported last words: “I'm Pat fucking Tillman!,” shouted repeatedly from the hilltop toward his jacked-up, oblivious comrades, roughly 40 yards away. The old title also references the 3,000-word report the Tillman family received from the military, which had so many names and places redacted that it took years for the Tillmans to fill in the blanks and find out exactly how they’d been lied to. Mostly though, the old title (like the new one) speaks to the way people on both the left and the right (but mostly the right) have tried to project their beliefs onto a man who kept his own close to the vest. Amir Bar-Lev, following up his excellent documentary My Kid Could Paint That, uses a conventional documentary format of talking heads, file footage, scanned documents and insert shots, but he assembles it all skillfully, presenting the Tillman The Patriot narrative first and then going back to show a more complicated man, whose real reasons for abandoning his lucrative football career to enlist in the military have never been fully revealed. Along the way, Bar-Lev blasts the media for merely parroting what the authorities tell them, and effectively accuses a succession of investigative bodies of entering outright, obvious lies into the public record. Most of the material in this movie has been seen, heard or read before, but never with this level of useful illustration. I for one had never seen the rousing footage of Tillman’s younger brother speaking at Pat’s memorial service. After John McCain and other political/military leaders spoke about Pat being in “a better place,” the younger Tillman took the stage with a pint of ale, thanked everyone for coming, then said, “By the way, Pat’s not in a better place, he’s fuckin’ dead. He wasn’t religious.” In the propaganda-filled realms of politics, sports and the military, that kind of no-bullshit truth feels so, so good to hear. No wonder the Tillman family has spent much of the last ten years fighting to hear it from the people that matter. Grade: B+