Thinking back to Brass Eye’s 2001 “paedophile special”, and in particular the furore it caused among certain sections of the media, it’s easy to see how misunderstood Chris Morris often is. Typically outraged, the Daily Mail described the episode as “a spoof documentary on paedophilia.” Which is missing the point. The programme was a savage attack on the media's own thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction to a serious issue. It clearly didn’t stop, though, large sections of the press demonstrating their own thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction to the show. It seems likely, I’m afraid, that those same sections of the media will be up in arms about Four Lions, Morris’ directorial debut, a “jihadist comedy”, no less, focussing on four wannabe suicide bombers in Sheffield. Which is a pity, as Four Lions is an extremely good film; far more than **just** a comedy about suicide bombers. It’s often tempting to try and guess exactly what Morris’s intentions are from project to project. Radio 4’s On The Hour – and it’s BBC TV extension, The Day Today – were as much about exploring the dynamics and specific technical details of news programmes as they were about sending-up of its po-faced self-importance. Jam - a personal favourite, and another radio-to-TV transfer - resided in an altogether more experimental place, a woozy 4am place of distorted dream logic. Nathan Barley – co-written with The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker – might well have sneered disdainfully at a certain London media archetype, but the show’s great trick was that, in the end, you sort of felt sorry for Barley, however repellent and idiotic a self-facilitating media node he may have been. So what exactly is Morris – and co-writers, Peep Show and The Thick Of It’s Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain - doing with Four Lions? On face value, it is, indeed, a very black comedy about four radical Muslims – three young Asians, and one white middle aged convert – who plan to blow themselves, and others, up during the London Marathon. Taken as farce, the film works extremely well. Their leader, Omar (Riza Ahmed), intriguingly, the most conventionally “westernised” character here, is a family man who tells his son bedtime stories, where the animals in The Lion King have become suicide bombers. There’s Fessal (Adeel Akhtar), who is training crows to carry bombs, Waj (Kayvan Novac), who can barely tie his own shoe-laces, and Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a maniacal convert who thinks it’d be quite a good way to punish non-Muslims by blowing up a mosque. The film follows them from their safe house in Sheffield, to the mountains of Pakistan, where two of them intend to train with the Mujahideen, back to Sheffield and on to London, and their intended entry into Paradise. Of course, things don’t go according to plan. The four men are, on almost every level, utterly incompetent. But, equally, they’re extremely dangerous. After all, they have a garage packed with bleach and fertilizer. Morris has said that “terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side-football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.” He cites examples like 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, who when teased for urinating too loudly, apparently blamed Jews for making thin bathroom doors, and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who supposedly spent hours looking for a costume that wouldn’t make him look fat on camera. But in Morris’ universe, everyone in the film is stupid, not just terrorists. There’s Nighty Night’s Julia Davis as a whacked-out neighbour who buys the quartet’s story that they’re in fact a band meeting for rehearsals; or Morris’ regular Kevin Eldon and Smack The Pony’s Darren Boyd as a pair of police snipers who mistake a Wookie costume for a bear costume, with calamitous results, and Benedict Cumerbatch as an inept hostage negotiator. There is plenty of excellent comedy here, much of it quite uncomfortable. So what’s Morris’ point? Is he simply making topical farce – a black comedy that, in its way, while touching on contemporary issues harks back to the darker output of the Ealing studios? Or, are we to believe that Morris’ aim is to illuminate terrorists as fallible, bickering, ultimately human people? Certainly, it’s true that one of Morris’ ongoing concerns in his work is to rigorously mine his subject, however shocking or taboo it might be, in a manner that demystifies it. Critical to this, I think, is Omar. It’s certainly unsettling to see him sitting in his pleasant, airy suburban house with his attractive wife Sophia (EastEnders’ Preeya Kalidas), discussing blowing himself up in reasonable, assured tones while bouncing his son on his knee. After all, aren’t we conditioned to imagine our terrorists as bearded devils, holed up in remote caves, issuing chilling threats on crudely-shot video tapes? Which, surely, is Morris' point. Four Lions opens in the UK on May 7

At the time of writing, the Oscars are three days away, and some folks, it seems, are getting jittery. Avatar, James Cameron’s lumbering 3D epic – seen by many as a shoe-in at Sunday’s ceremony – doesn’t appear quite the sure bet it was a few weeks ago. The reason? The significant head of steam built up by Kathryn Bigelow’s bomb disposal drama, The Hurt Locker. Doing the rounds of the Awards ceremonies, Bigelow’s film has conclusively trumped Cameron’s – 15 Best Picture awards for The Hurt Locker against 2 for Avatar. There’s been plenty of meat for hungry Oscar watchers to get their teeth into along the way, of course. There’s the David and Goliath tussle – Avatar’s $300m budget and phenomenal box office success vs The Hurt Locker’s slimline $15m; it’s the Little Film That Could. Then there’s the fact Cameron and Bigelow were once married. This appears to be a dead-end issue, in fact; Cameron and Bigelow are reportedly still close, and both sought each other’s advice on their respective movies. All the same, it’s interesting to see how, over the last few weeks before the Oscar ballot closed on Tuesday March 2, The Hurt Locker has become the target of a negative campaign. Among the most interesting, arguably, was a story in the Los Angeles Times on February 25, which questioned the film’s authenticity, with active soldiers and veterans claiming the film doesn’t depict combat accurately. I wonder quite how relevant an issue this really is. When has a war movie genuinely presented conflict as it really was? Looking back at the last significant wave of war movies – the canon of Vietnam movies from the Seventies – and they’re flawed in the way they portrayed the war. Of that initial slew of Vietnam movies - Coming Home, The Boys In Company C and The Deer Hunter – they touched on Viet Nam, but weren’t really about the conflict. The came Apocalypse Now, which might capture some of the extreme madness and horror (the horror…) fighting in the jungles of South East Asia, but had little to do with the accuracy of that conflict. That Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now are widely seen as occupying the upper echelons of that glorious canon of Seventies’ movies is based less on the veracity of their depiction of war, but down to other factors. For many, it’s Oliver Stone’s Platoon that stands as the first, real and accurate depiction of the war. But even that received as many brickbats and plaudits. Stone, decorated during his service in Vietnam, came under fire from the far-right, with Washington Times' writer John Podhoretz calling it "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." Meanwhile, John Wheeler, chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, said: “Platoon makes us real… it is part of the healing process.” All the same, in much the same way that its predecessors like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now aren’t really Vietnam war movies, The Hurt Locker isn’t really a film about Iraq. It simply uses the setting as a way to examine the way certain men respond under pressure. But, more generally, I wonder since when has accuracy or truth telling been a prerequisite of the movies? Films are just films, surely?

A nice surprise in the post yesterday, when a big box full of their beautiful CDs, records and cassettes turned up from Natural Snow Buildings. Seeing these actual objects for the first time – as opposed to just hearing their rapturous music – confirmed that they were as beautiful as their reputation suggested, further proving the meticulous craft and care with which Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte go about their work. It also reminded me that I ought to post the piece I wrote for the magazine a couple of months ago, since I’ve never blogged properly about this extraordinary band. Here goes: A little before Christmas, a Bristol friend visited London to see a French duo who were supporting Fennesz and Grouper. The duo went under the name of Natural Snow Buildings and, to be honest, I’d never heard of them before. This wasn’t entirely surprising. Natural Snow Buildings may have released a formidable number of albums (way into double figures) over the past decade. But most of their albums have only surfaced in tiny numbers: "The Winter Ray" was reputedly limited to just 15 copies; "Daughters Of Darkness", a set of cassette tapes totalling six hours of music (heartily recommended by a correspondent here, incidentally) ran to 150. Even for a small cult band, this sort of behaviour looks on the surface like bloody-minded elitism. Maybe, though, Natural Snow Buildings are pioneering a newish model of disseminating music, where an obsessive few can purchase (by all accounts) exquisite, hand-crafted limited editions, and the rest of us are implicitly permitted to hunt down free downloads of the music. It’s not a business model that will guarantee a young band a lucrative career comparable to, say, that of The Pigeon Detectives. But for a generation of underground musicians content to let their work spread organically and discreetly, who have a realistic understanding that they’re not going to make fortunes by pursuing their music, it must start looking both artful and pragmatic. That said, after having been furnished with a dozen or so Natural Snow Buildings albums, I’d be very happy to see them receive some more publicity and acclaim, because large tranches of their catalogue sound quite gorgeous. This great, fragile avalanche of music has a cumulative impact, and it might not be until you’ve worked your way through a few of their records that their charm really emerges. My current favourite, "The Snowbringer Cult" (a 2CD set on Students Of Decay from 2008, extending to an unimaginably profligate 1,000 copies), is a fine example of what the couple – Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte – do. Disc One showcases Gularte’s solo project, Isengrind, then Ameziane’s, TwinSisterMoon. Gularte works with brackish, delicate ambient drones, reminiscent of Popol Vuh, fuzzy ‘90s outriders Flying Saucer Attack and Matt Valentine’s forerunners of the US free folk scene, Tower Recordings. Ameziane, meanwhile, favours brittle folk songs, which he sings in an uncanny whisper that’s close in tone and spirit to that of Vashti Bunyan. On Disc Two, the pair hook up, balancing the two strains of noise and singer-songwriter craft with an elegance that reminds me of PG Six’s early work (an alumnus of Tower Recordings, as it happens). As you’ve probably intuited, an ineffable air of preciousness hovers around Natural Snow Buildings, compounded by their song titles – “The Bones Of A Raven's Meal”, “The Spears Of The Wolfe”, “Slayer Of The King Of Hell”, “Ghost Pathway Toward Midgard” – which suggest Gularte and Ameziane learned English from a libraryful of lurid, sub-Tolkien fantasy novels. Amazingly, though, a plausible mystique endures, too – and not just because original copies of their albums are as rare as sacred artefacts. Have a look around for their music, and let me know what you think.