Welcome to Artstastic, your home-made view on the arts. From news to reviews and beyond, Sachtastic will aim to bring you everything you wanted or needed to know about creative goings-on. The launch, I'm afraid was mildly delayed, but I hope to be posting every Tuesday.
A film review, then, for starters. Four Lions. It's a film I've been wanting to see for ages, since I looked up Benedict Cumberbatch after he stunned me so in BBC's Sherlock. Cumberbatch, incidentally, does not feature excessively in the film.
On paper, Four Lions was a recipe for a terrible film. It's about suicide bombers, yet it's a comedy. There are few less funny subjects than suicide bombing, but they still thought this was a viable topic. It could have gone so horribly wrong.
Then again, it really didn't. It worked perfectly. The motivations of the would-be Jihadists are well-presented; though the characters are daft, they're fully formed. Their stupidity seems to originate from stupidity rather than from poor scriptwriting. It's hard to explain without spoiling it really, but though the characters were often stupid, they were only as stupid as it is possible to be within the realms of human experience. Also, the fact that incompetence was rife on all sides -the Jihadists, the politicians, the police - made it somehow fair. As long as the police were too incompetent to notice the terrorists, it was perfectly acceptable that the terrorists were too incompetent to disguise the nature of their activities.
It didn't just work, either. It was bloody hilarious in a way that just makes me want to tell you to watch it. The beginning of the film is made up of "bloopers" of the group making Jihadi video wills, which sets the pace for the rest of the film. It's a clever film about idiots.
For me, a key thing which made this film not only funny, but good, is the fact that the central character, aside from wanting to be a suicide bomber, is a perfectly balanced, perfectly human person. The film also looks at his family life, along with the differences between his and his brother's interpretations of Islam.
This film was made to a budget, and occasionally that shows, but not often enough to detract from it in any way. It is absolutely a 5 star film, and the only truly original piece of cinema I have seen in a long time. I hope people realise how good it is. Watch or... well, the alternative is unthinkable.
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