Here come the Lions

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 3 Comments

Chris Morris’s Four Lions has debuted to uneasy but strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival. It may be the most eagerly awaited English-language comic project on the planet. Morris is a unique figure—a secretive, almost reclusive English radio and TV writer who occasionally emerges from hiding to spray vitriol at the Establishment and, generally, the self-satisfied and delusional. His series The Day Today and Brass Eye cannot be watched without the viewer being astonished that such jokes and surreal images ever made it to air. Even to think of them makes one redden in shame for the masses of herd-followers who think of Conan O’Brien as hip and transgressive.

Morris’s most recent finished work, the six-part Nathan Barley (2005), arguably reached down to hit targets that were slightly beneath him (and his collaborator, the critic Charlie Brooker). I guess I can understand a couple of moralizing comics wanting to puncture (Canada’s own!) Vice magazine empire, but the lightly disguised vendetta seemed like a bit much coming from a creator capable of eviscerating corporations, governments, celebrity in general, and any number of global institutions without breaking a visible sweat. On the other hand, Nathan Barley‘s plentiful potshots at the internet hype machine and the twerpish little creatures who drive its noöspheric hamster-wheel have never seemed more relevant than they do in the age of the “social media” professional (2009-????).

Anyway, now Morris has taken on a worthy opponent: terrorism, and the West’s reaction to it. A couple of years back he uncharacteristically showed his hand by engaging in a brief feud with Martin Amis. I’m declaring myself firmly on the fence on that one: I don’t find anything very edifying about a contest in which one side is shouting “fascist” and the other “racist”, with the winner to be decided by means of a decibel meter. I still can’t wait to see Four Lions. Here’s a clip that hit the Web Friday.

The real reason to see 'Precious'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Mo’Nique creates one of the most ferocious female villains ever to grace the screen

Sometimes a movie becomes more than a movie; it turns into a movement. That’s what has happened to Precious. It began in January, when its director, Lee Daniels, took a cellphone call from Oprah Winfrey as he was getting up to accept the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Oprah told him his movie “split her open” and offered to throw her weight behind it. Precious went on to win the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and is generating massive Oscar buzz. It’s this year’s Slumdog Millionaire, another underdog drama of an abused ghetto child with showbiz dreams trying to overcome enormous odds. But Precious, the harrowing tale of a 350-lb. Harlem teen who’s impregnated for the second time by her father, makes Slumdog look like a Disney movie. No movie heroine has ever grappled with more issues at once: she’s black, poor, obese, abused, illiterate, unloved, pregnant and HIV positive.

Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, Precious is fiction. But as the movie morphs into a cause, its inspirational message has become inseparable from the real-life personalities behind it, who have embraced the film as a healing touchstone to their own childhood horrors of sexual or physical abuse. That includes Sapphire, Daniels—and the two iconic moguls who signed on to the film after its premiere, Winfrey and Tyler Perry. But no one incarnates the horror of abuse more vividly than Mo’Nique, the 41-year-old powerhouse who portrays the monstrous mother of the film’s teenage heroine. The actress says she drew directly on her own experience of suffering four years of abuse from her brother, starting at age seven. The director told her to “be a monster,” she told the New York Times. “And my brother was that monster to me. That’s who I became.” Continue…