Jihadist comedy anyone?

That’s right. The ever-brave Chris Morris is understanding Jihadism in Britain with Four Lions (February). They are humans after all. Have a look at the clip.

Chris Morris’ "Four Lions" is a funny, thrilling comedy that illuminates modern jihadism through the prism of farce. It understands jihadists as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. What "This Is Spinal Tap" did for heavy metal and "Dr Strangelove" the Cold War, "Four Lions" does for the modern face of terrorism.

A Prophet: The other side of being a gangster

A Prophet follows nineteen year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) who is condemned to six years in prison. Arriving in jail friendless and alone with no-one to protect him, he finds himself drawn into the brutal violence and gang warfare of daily prison life. The film’s about making it in the mafia really. But being a member of the Mafia isn’t all about the tough-guy image. Here’s a list of unknown facts that tell a different story……

Hot shot

Notorious American gangster Al Capone was the leader of a major crime syndicate responsible for racketeering during the 1920s – 1930s. He is considered one of the biggest crime lords of all time and is referenced amongst crime culture to this day. During a game of golf with the also infamous Johnny Patton he once shot himself. Capone was getting into a car when his .45 went off in his right pocket, and caught him in both the legs and groin giving more than a hole in one.

What a pretty Scarface

Some of the most popular fronts for crime organisations are actually tanning shops and nail parlours. The most popular "legitimate" businesses which are often a cover up for criminal activity and money laundering are: car dealerships, solariums, nail bars and massage parlours. Not quite what you’d expect from gangsters and mobsters but at least they’ll always look good.

The Mob can sob

Rumour has it that poetry competitions are popular amongst mafia and mob members and are held annually in America, no surprise there. They apparently are used for gangsters to share their emotions and help deal with the violence and crime they have to endure day to day. Poor souls!

Flower power

Charles Dean O’Banion was an Irish-American mobster who was the main rival of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. They were rivals during the brutal Chicago bootlegging wars of the 1920s. Newspapers of his day made him better known as Dion O’Banion. He was a ruthless gangsters as well as professional singer. Strangely though what he loved in life was floral arrangement, and even owned his own flower shop called O’Banion’s. It was customary in mob culture to send flowers to the funeral of a man you shot, and O’Banion supplied flowers for most of the criminal underworld.

A Prophet is in cinemas January 22nd.

Star Wars Burlesque LOL

For anyone that likes Boba Fett a little too much, this might be right up your street.

More about the sexy sci-fi phenomenon can be found here.

The awards have lost their sparkle. Could they be more fun?

By Daniel Marler

How to make the film awards more interesting.

Oh god. Here it comes again: the movie award season. Around this time, everyone seems to be saying, ‘oh, oh i think so-and-so is going to win best actor’, or ‘this film is clearly going to wipe the floor with all the other opposition’. Truth is, no one really cares. And can you blame us for our indifference? Really?! Can you? I don’t think so. I mean, who is going to get up at whatever ungodly hour the Oscars (because, let’s face it that’s the only one that anyone has vague interest in) are shown on British television to watch various people with far more expensive lifestyles than you giving little gold men to people with equally extravagant lifestyles?

But what happened? A few years ago everyone was gagging to see who won best film, best director and so on. Have we just lost interest in films altogether? Unlikely. With more expensive, visually-arresting films being released, such as the monstrously budgeted Avatar that was released late last year, a loss of interest in films would make very little sense indeed. The actual reason is that the awards ceremonies themselves simply do not grab our interest sufficiently. This is hardly surprising though. The ceremonies themselves take about a million hours to finish and are usually presented by someone who is supposed to be a hip new comedian/presenter but in actual fact is about as dull as a tax form. This on the back of incredibly self-serving speeches made by the winners themselves, such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s monstrosity of a speech that followed Shakespeare In Love.

So how do we make them more interesting and more appealing to people? Well, here we have a few suggestions to the people who run the whole show on how to make the ceremonies bearable.

1. Ditch some of the awards

The actual numbers of awards is a phenomenally long list. From the ones that we actually care about (Best Director, Film, Actor, Actress) it ranges right the way through to things like Best Make-up, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. OK, these people have clearly put a lot of time and effort into their various departments, and I’m not saying that their jobs are easy, but the award that goes to who can apply the best mascara does not appeal to 99.9% of the people watching. So just ditch some of them and give them a separate awards ceremony or something.

2. Vary the presenters

The worst scenario we have, is when some supposedly-edgy new comedian presents the show and makes it even more boring than it already is with tiresome jokes and quips that make you want to hammer on the screen, screaming ‘GET ON WITH IT’. What would be far better is if we had a variety of comedians/presenters who are all of significant standing, e.g. Jack Dee, Billy Connelly to make the show much more entertaining.

3. Limit the length of the speeches

As previously ranted, over-long acceptance speeches are such a bore. They are arguably one of the worst features of the shows. No one, especially not the people who have just lost the award wants to hear the winner sobbing in floods of tears about how they would like to thank their English teacher from primary school for some pointlessly obscure reason. It annoys us at home as well, since we just want to know who won so we can switch over to something far more interesting. A time limit would cure this horrible affliction to our TV. If we had a cap on the amount of time you could spend making that tiresome speech then the ceremonies would be far more interesting. Just to add a little more flavour, there should be a forfeit for the people who go over the limit, such as being dragged offstage by the hair or something that would satisfy our insatiable desire for revenge that has built over years of mental torture at the hands of these people.

If these rules were heeded by the Gods of the Oscars then maybe we would end up with an award ceremony that we would be capable of watching without having to keep flicking over to the other side, or to sleep.

YOUR favourite flick of last year

I promise you, this will be the last you hear about the best of/worst of the year/decade/millennium. We’ve had quite enough of all this list-making.

But you’re the ones who created this one so it’s your own fault really,

We preached to you, stating emphatically that the best flicks of the year were In The Loop, Pixar’s Up and Moon. Did you agree? No.

No you guys went for Jim Cameron’s planet-conjuring sci-fi epic Avatar.

30% of the 21,000 of you who voted went for the new blockbuster. In second was Star Trek with 16% of the vote and third was shared between Up and Paranormal Activity, both with 13%.

So congratulations Jim Cameron, you have the love of the MSN Movies users to go alongside your special effects Oscar, now please don’t make a speech about being “King of the world”.

Sex and the City 2

Golden Globes noms announced

As always, the Golden Globes noms are a long and arduous list to delve through.

My digested early thoughts run to: surprise at Avatar getting nommed (drama!?), surprise at Robert Downey’s nom for Sherlock Holmes, surprise at Julia Roberts’ nom for Duplicity and a sincere hope that Kathryn Bigelow wins the Director gong for The Hurt Locker.

FILM

BEST FEATURE – DRAMA

"Avatar"

"The Hurt Locker"

"Inglourious Basterds"

"Precious"

"Up in the Air"

BEST FEATURE – COMEDY

"(500) Days of Summer"

"The Hangover"

"It’s complicated"

"Julie & Julia"

"Nine"

ACTOR – DRAMA

Jeff Bridges, "Crazy Heart"

George Clooney, "Up in the Air"

Colin Firth, "A Simple Man"

Morgan Freeman, "Invictus"

Tobey Maguire, "Brothers"

ACTRESS – DRAMA

Emily Blunt, "The Young Victoria"

Sandra Bullock, "The Blind Side"

Helen Mirren, "The Last Station"

Carey Mulligan, "An Education"

Gabourey Sidibe, "Precious"

ACTOR – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

Matt Damon, "The Informant"

Daniel Day-Lewis, "Nine"

Robert Downey Jr., "Sherlock Holmes"

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, "500 Days of Summer"

Michael Stuhlbarg, "A Serious Man"

ACTRESS – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

Sandra Bullock, "The Proposal"

Marion Cotillard, "Nine"

Julia Roberts,"Duplicity"

Meryl Streep, "It’s Complicated"

Meryl Streep, "Julie & Julia"

DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE

Kathryn Bigelow – "The Hurt Locker"

James Cameron – "Avatar"

Clint Eastwood – "Invictus"

Jason Reitman – "Up in the Air"

Quentin Tarantino – "Inglourious Basterds"

SUPPORTING ACTOR

Matt Damon – "Invictus"

Woody Harrelson – "The Messenger"

Christopher Plumber – "The Last Station"

Stanley Tucci – "The Lovely Bones"

Christopher Waltz – "Inglorious Basterds"

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Penelope Cruz – "Nine"

Vera Farmiga – "Up in the Air"

Anna Kendrick – "Up in the Air"

Mo’Nique – "Precious"

Julianne Moore – "A Single Man"

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"

"Coraline"

"Fantastic Mr. Fox"

"The Princess and the Frog"

"Up"

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

"Cinema Italiano" from "Nine"

"I Want to Come Home" from "Everybody’s Fine"

"I Will See You" from "Avatar"

"The Weary Kind" from "Crazy Heart"

"Winter" from "Brothers"

Sure, Avatar is impressive to look at. But…

This isn’t a review, rather a breath of stale air following the deflating experience of Jim Cameron’s blockbuster.

Avatar is successful in being amazingly expansive. You really do feel the size of the alien world Pandora, where Sam Worthington is tasked with infiltrating an alien society of 10-foot blue things, inhabiting one of their bodies in the process, and persuading them to leave their enormous tree-house so that the evil forces of mankind can drill for the precious metal beneath them. It’s a vaguely preachy enviro-angle mixed with a metaphor about native Indians.

But, story-line aside, it’s the “wow!” factor I was expecting that really failed to hit home. The colours and the graphics are wonderful. The computer game feel (somewhere between Final Fantasy and Mass Effect) seems almost intentional. But I was never once awed in a new or groundbreaking way. The 3D generation of movies are far more secure against film piracy (the main reason the studios love it) but they’re just not blowing me off my feet as advertised. This comes as a particular disappointment in the case of Avatar – a film we’ve been hearing about for the best part of a decade. For all this time we’ve been wondering what technical marvels Cameron is dreaming up in his endlessly budgeted lab. The result is a wonderfully detailed sci-fi vision, but not an elevated mode of storytelling.

Personally my “3D moment” happened in 2D when I went to see The Dark Knight in 2D I-Max. This goes way beyond any of my experiences with silly green and red glasses on. You know – the bit at the beginning when we’re flying over Gotham.

Don’t get us wrong, there are amazingly bold pieces of camera-work in Avatar that imagine an alien planet like you’ve never quite seen before.? But knocked off your feet? I’ll wager you won’t be.

Over The Moon

A quick congratulations to Duncan Jones and Moon for its success at the British Independent Film Awards last night.

I finally caught this imaginative sci-fi flick on Blu-Ray a couple of weeks ago. And the hype is justified. Don’t allow yourself to be put off by this Indie award either. You can watch this with mates at the weekend.

Yes, it is about the vacuous loneliness of living in space. No light sabres or laser guns are anywhere to be seen. BUT, it’s one of those movies that cleverly invites you to talk about it for days afterwards. Sam Rockwell is the lonely moon station resident questioning his own sanity and he’s brilliant.

It doesn’t require nearly as much patience as you might think.Could Moon go on and grab nominations in the major awards. We’ll find out when the Oscar noms come round in January. There will, of course, be a hefty load of awards coverage running right through January and February here on MSN Movies.

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