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
IMDB linkHere
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
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