Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends) (2017)

Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends) (2017)

IMDB Rating 8.4/10

A little over a year ago, nine terrorists drove into Paris with guns, grenades, and suicide belts. They were there to perpetrate a coordinated, calculated mass murder on behalf of ISIL and,... See full summary »

Director: Colin Hanks

Stars: Jesse Hughes, Josh Homme, Dave Catching

1h 24min | Documentary

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For his second documentary feature, Colin Hanks profiles Eagles of Death Metal, the American band whose Paris concert was interrupted by a deadly terrorist attack, as they prepare to return to the French capital.

As he showed in All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, Colin Hanks has a feel for American pop culture and fandom, and a knack for connecting with his interview subjects. In the case of his new film, the subjects are also friends of his: the Southern California hard rock act who performed at the premiere for his first doc — and whose November 2015 show at the Bataclan theater in Paris was interrupted by three heavily armed Islamic State militants who left 90 people dead and hundreds wounded.

You don’t have to be a follower of Eagles of Death Metal, or even glancingly familiar with their music, to appreciate the emotional power of Hanks’ deeply felt film, Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends).

Devoting the first third of the doc to the band’s backstory proves especially effective. It would be an absorbing story under any circumstances, given Hughes and Homme’s strong personalities and the particular desert culture that formed them, with its growth-center composite of the working-class and the well-heeled, conservative politics and artists' nonconformity. But given the crucible of events at the Bataclan, the love between Hughes and Homme takes on an urgency that’s epitomized in several scenes before the triumphant February concert at the Olympia. Homme has made the transatlantic trip just days after the birth of his son in order to perform with Hughes, who runs into his arms when he first sees him at the venue.

Hanks also interviews a few French fans, diehards who were at the Bataclan show and who greet the Olympia concert three months later as nothing less than a necessity: “We had to finish that gig,” one of the survivors says. Hughes would call her a friend, not a fan; for him and his bandmates, for good and for bad, they and their audience are in it together. “We’re all rock ’n’ rollers,” he says. The director includes no graphic footage of the destruction at the Bataclan, but harrowing images arise nonetheless in the recollections of the band and members of the audience: the sounds, the blood, the fear, the musicians' wait for the shooters to reload their automatic weapons so that they might run for their lives. Looking for his girlfriend, Hughes came face-to-face with one of the gunmen and by sheer happenstance avoided being shot.

There’s undeniable psychic damage and, however irrational, survivor’s guilt. Focusing on the sense of responsibility that Hughes feels toward his French fans — “a holy charge,” he calls it — Hanks doesn’t delve into the controversy that arose over some of his post-Bataclan comments. But in a French TV interview that is one of the film’s most intense sequences, Hughes delves briefly, and unfashionably, into the political ramifications of the slaughter. More tellingly, he comes close to a panic attack when he first sits down before the television cameras. The politics can be debated endlessly, but one conclusion that Hughes draws from his firsthand experience is beyond question. He's a man who’s been to hell and is still working his way back, and when he recalls the carnage he witnessed, he says definitively, “It’s not like it is in the movies.”

 Read full review at  Hollywood Reporter

Eagles of Death Metal’ Revisits the Paris Terror Attack

Colin Hanks has a lot of experience as an actor but little as a documentary filmmaker. He set himself a formidable challenge with “Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends),” his documentary about the American rock band that was performing at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, when terrorists killed 90 people there.

The film has a lot of emotion to capture as it chronicles the band’s return to Paris three months after the attack to, in a sense, complete the concert that the terrorists interrupted. It’s a pileup of sorrow, survivor guilt, anger and defiance that sometimes grows unruly.

Mr. Homme, in this telling (which HBO will broadcast on Monday), steered Mr. Hughes to a rock ’n’ roll career to give his friend focus after some personal setbacks, and he speaks with admiration about how Mr. Hughes found a new purpose when he stepped onstage. But Mr. Homme, who is also a member of Queens of the Stone Age, often doesn’t tour with Eagles of Death Metal, and he was not part of the lineup that played the Bataclan on the fateful day.

The vivid recollections of the attack by survivors, including Mr. Hughes, take over the film midway through, and the friendship story line never quite re-establishes itself. The return concert, too, ends up feeling less cathartic than it might have; it’s more coda than main focus.

 Read full review at New york times