September 9, 2018

Palme d’Or Winner Jacques Audiard Says He’ll Never Bring a Movie to Cannes Competition Again — TIFF

Among the anticipated 2018 movies that didn’t surface in the Cannes lineup earlier this year, one stood out: The bloody Western “The Sisters Brothers,” the first English-language movie from French auteur Jacques Audiard. Arguably the most acclaimed French director working today, the 66-year-old director of tough, masculine dramas won the Palme d’Or for this last movie, “Dheepan,” and has been a part of the festival’s exclusive directors club for years. He won a best screenplay award for “A Self Made Hero” in 1996, the festival’s Grand Prix in 2009 for “A Prophet,” and returned to the competition four years later with “Rust and Bone.” But “The Sisters Brothers” skipped the festival, reportedly because the September 21 release plan from Annapurna Pictures made a fall launchpad more attractive.

However, in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival — where “The Sisters Brothers” screened following its world premiere in Venice — Audiard said his relationship to Cannes had evolved since winning its top prize three years ago.

“I don’t feel a need to be there,” he said, and added that he no longer wanted his films programmed in the festival’s venerated Official Competition section. If Cannes director Thierry Fremaux offered Audiard a slot, the director said, “I will refuse it. I don’t really care if I go to Cannes or not.” He clarified that he had little interest in competition sections at other festivals: “I don’t want to be in competition anywhere,” he said.

At a press conference before Cannes in May, Fremaux told a roomful of journalists that he anticipated American films would be more likely to avoid Cannes due awards season plans. “The French are more and more obsessed with Cannes, and Americans are more and more obsessed with the Oscars,” he said.

While taking a break from Cannes this year, Audiard said he was bored by all the drama surrounding the festival, particularly the rule banning Netflix films from competition that led the streaming platform to pull all its titles from the lineup. “I don’t give a shit,” he said, when asked about the fracas. Nevertheless, he sided with the festival. “It’s always difficult to make films,” he said. “The world is changing and I don’t know if people still want films. That’s the problem with Netflix. Are we talking about theaters or cinema when it’s on the tablet? That’s not cinema.”

Despite his many years of experience, Audiard acknowledged that “The Sisters Brothers” would provide most American audiences with their first introduction to his work. “I think people like me here,” he said. “They just don’t know me. That may change, but I won’t.” The movie, which stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as siblings who work as hired guns in the Old West, veers from gritty shootouts to more sensitive family moments. “It presents me well,” Audiard said, “because it’s a little witty.”

Source: IndieWire film

September 9, 2018

CBS Chief Les Moonves Expected to Resign Following Six More Accusations of Sexual Harassment

Following the publication of a New Yorker report that includes six more allegations against the embattled CBS chief, Les Moonves is expected to resign his post by tomorrow morning. A total of 12 women have now accused him of sexual misconduct, with some of their stories dating back decades; according to CNN, CBS’ board of directors will announce the departure after a “global” settlement that could be worth more than $100 is finalized.

“I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances,” Moonves said in a statement following the first round of accusations. “Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely. But I always understood and respected — and abided by the principle — that ‘no’ means ‘no.’”

The latest New Yorker report was written by Ronan Farrow, as was the first; he has also reported extensively on Harvey Weinstein and other high-profile figures accused of sexual misconduct.

Among Moonves’ accusers is Illeana Douglas, who alleges that he held her down and forcibly kissed her in 1997. “You sort of black out,” she said at the time. “You think, How long is this going to go on? I was just looking at this nice picture of his family and his kids. I couldn’t get him off me…It has stayed with me the rest of my life, that terror,” she added.

Source: IndieWire film

September 9, 2018

‘Hotel Mumbai’ Review: Armie Hammer and Dev Patel’s Harrowing, Humane Film About the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks — TIFF

If we have to keep making action movies out of the most unspeakably horrifying terrorist attacks of the 21st century (and that’s still up for debate), they might as well be as lucid and humane as Anthony Maras’ “Hotel Mumbai.” A dramatization of the November 2008 ambush on India’s largest city, the film — it should go without saying — is harrowing to the extreme. Almost unbearable, in fact.

However, Maras’ powerful debut feature only deserves so much credit for its immaculate craft. It isn’t hard to pillage riveting entertainment from the scene of a real massacre, and scavenging the dead for cheap suspense often is closer to robbing graves than it is to making art. The value of a movie like “Hotel Mumbai,” or “U-July 22,” or “United 93” is not and cannot be measured by how engaging it is to watch. The grisly spectacle is only a means to an end. What redeems “Hotel Mumbai” from morbid opportunism is that, in all but its slickest and most Hollywood moments, the thrills of Maras’ heart-wrenching re-enactment are never an end unto themselves. Even when a desperate Armie Hammer is running around in search of his missing baby, or a stoic Dev Patel is delivering a covert audition to be the next James Bond, the movie is leveraging its sick violence to humanize the people on either side of it.

Shot with quiet confidence, “Hotel Mumbai” begins with the terrorists, as 10 members of Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba land their inflatable speedboat on the city shores. Within minutes, two of the jihadists are indiscriminately shooting up the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, while the others spread the bloodshed across the city. Meanwhile, at the monumental Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, a low-ranking employee named Arjun (a movingly heroic Patel) is having a rough day; his sick baby made him late to work, and he’s lost a shoe on the way. That kind of thing doesn’t fly at a five-star luxury resort that prides itself on excellence — an excellence embodied by world-class chef Hemant Oberoi (the great Anupam Kher, recently seen in “The Big Sick”), who is the only real person represented in the movie aside from the terrorists.

Everyone else is a fictional composite of victims, survivors, and police, all of whom have clearly been engineered for maximum narrative efficiency. While Arjun is almost sent home for his misconduct, the rest of the staff at the five-star luxury resort are racing to get things ready for their VIP guests, including a white architect called David (Hammer, convincing in a thankless role), his beautiful Middle Eastern wife Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi), their babysitter (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), and their baby.

The other high-roller we meet is a (very) lecherous (and very) Russian businessman played by Jason Isaacs, who starts off as something of a heel before the terrorists storm the hotel and the battle lines are redrawn. His accent alone is thick enough to tip the movie toward Hollywood every time he speaks, but Isaacs’ over-the-top performance is comic relief in the truest sense. After sitting through the savageness of the attack, which Maras stages (on a convincing Adelaide set) with excruciating but unostentatious clarity, any respite is welcome.

Of course, Isaac’s ultra-affluent character also serves a deeper narrative purpose: His white and wealthy entitlement allows him a presumption of survival. Everyone flees to the expensive hotel when the shooting begins on the streets outside, and Vasili epitomizes why: Money and class are naturally conflated with safety. There’s a good reason why the terrorists knew that indiscriminate bloodshed would funnel people toward such a towering symbol of wealth and progress. Needless to say, a large bank account is no guarantee of coming out alive, and “Hotel Mumbai” dismantles the notion that it should be. It’s not that Maras suggests the rich deserve to be murdered, but rather that he sees this vivid nightmare as a reminder that social hierarchies — and the otherness they inspire — are anathema to what little solidarity still keeps this world cinched together.

There’s a big sign in the employee area of the hotel that the staff is forced to read aloud every day and repeat as a mantra: “Guest is God.” If the terrorists are motivated by one demented ideology, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the staff is motivated by another — some of them are even willing to risk death for their faith in customer relations. In a lesser movie that fixated on its Western victims, this might have gone unquestioned; in a lesser movie, it might have been taken for granted that brown lives were somehow worth less than the white ones they served.

But, with the benefit of facts on its side, “Hotel Mumbai” leverages the broken dichotomy between guests and staff as an opportunity to celebrate the heroism of the Taj’s Indian employees, who don’t abandon their clientele just because they can. When the world is upside down, and the people who work in the bowels of the hotel are given the greatest chance of escape, most stay behind (though the film makes a point not to shame the ones who leave). They refuse to make the distinction between tourists and natives, refuse to be clouded by the shadow of colonialism, refuse to believe that they were stronger alone than they were all together. Even when Maras’ script (co-written by John Collee) is a bit clumsy about how it pushes Arjun and Oberoi into leadership roles — brace for a racist old white lady, and a scene in which Arjun dissolves her fear by explaining the meaning of his turban — Patel and Kher are believable enough to push through these eye-roll moments.

That makes for a transparently stark contrast with the terrorists, who have been indoctrinated to think about their targets as if they’re animals. And yet, Maras’ script even affords the murderers a measure of humanity without absolving them of their sins. The terrorists are almost as scared as everyone else, instilling fear in others in order to obliviate their own. They tell jokes. They call their parents. The movie doesn’t ask its audience to forgive the killers, or to sympathize with them in the slightest; it just argues for the unrealized potential of these lost young men, who were nurtured by a hatred that didn’t come to them naturally.

As effective as “Hotel Mumbai” can be at illustrating these optimistic ideas, its obvious fictions can’t help but cheapen them; the decision to intercut real news footage from 2008 might have been necessary to make this dramatization more believable, but it also underscores the full extent of the film’s artifice. That the screenwriters’ guiding hand — and not the wrinkles of history — determine who lives and who dies, needlessly complicates the suspense. But if any of the humanity mined by Maras’ film ever takes root, perhaps the real victims who inspired these fine stand-ins will not have died in vain.

Grade: B

“Hotel Mumbai” premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Bleecker Street will release the film in theaters in 2019.

Source: IndieWire film