The Infidel

[pro-bassoonist]

Josh Appignanesi's The Infidel (2010) has received a preliminary release date: August 9.

Pre-order:
The Infidel

Official site and trailer:
http://infidelmovie.com/landing-trailer/

Frontrowfilms:

I'm always a sucker for a comedy that actually makes me laugh and this anti-religious bigotry comedy did make me laugh several times - out loud.

Omad Djalili stars as Mahmud Nasir, an anglicised Pakistani Muslim and Spurs fan, who runs a minicab company. His son wants to marry a young Pakistani woman, but the girl's mother is marrying an extremist Muslim cleric, so that Mahmud's son begs his dad to be a good Muslim. It is just at this point that while going through his late mother's papers, he discovers that he was adopted, and that his birth parents were - gulp - Jewish.

As you can imagine this makes life complicated in the extreme, especially since he tries to conceal his Jewishness from his family, while finding out more about it for more personal reasons. This leads to the funniest part of the film in which he learns how to be Jewish from Lenny Goldberg (Richard Schiff from West Wing), a short-tempered Jewish/American taxi driver. The scenes these two have together are the best part of the film, as writer David Baddiel misses no opportunity to give offence to as many religious/racial stereotypes as possible.

In the end, it's all concluded in a lame manner, as is too often the way with comedies which aspire to be edgy, but the journey to the not-so-bitter ending is a pleasure. In a world where most comedies are bland American romcoms, this has the outstanding (and unusual) merit of being funny.

Pro-B