Harvey Weinstein

  • Il postino [The Postman] (1994)

    Il postino [The Postman] (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, February 2021) As I’m slowly making my way through the list of movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, I can usually understand why they were nominated —The Academy is often predictable, and watching the films is usually enough to see how they correspond to the broad categories most likely to earn a nomination. But there’s a meta-game at play as well, and watching Il Postino is a good reminder that there are often external factors to consider. On its own, it doesn’t seem like such a strong film. As a story about a poor fisherman’s son who befriends famed poet Pablo Neruda, it clearly plays on familiar themes — poor versus famous, self-discovery through art, bucolic boosterism and so on. Philippe Noiret is quite good as Neruda (even if his voice is dubbed in Italian — Noiret without his own specific voice is a disappointment), while Massimo Troisi makes for a likable protagonist as an uneducated man gathering an appreciation for art, romance and the world through bringing Neruda’s mail. But that doesn’t seem as if it’s enough: Il Postino plays with arthouse themes but doesn’t feel like the kind of film that the Academy goes nuts over. Then you look at the film’s production history and its American releasing studio and it all starts making sense. For one thing, it turns out that writer/star Troisi was gravely ill during shooting, even pushing back heart surgery in order to complete the film… and he died the day after principal shooting wrapped. Now that’s the kind of dying-for-your-art story that the Academy loves to nominate. But the final piece of the puzzle is simple: Miramax. At the time Il Postino went to the Academy Awards, Miramax was known as an unusually skilled movie awards campaigner: now-disgraced studio owner Harvey Weinstein was a legend in pushing his slate of movies “for consideration” to Academy voters, and the 1990s are littered with curious Academy Award nominations (and wins!) that all share Miramax as their American distributor. To be clear: Il Postino is not a bad movie, and I suppose that anyone stumbling upon it would be at least halfway charmed by its take on the postman and the poet. But if you come at it, as I did, with an eye on completing your list of 1990s Academy Award nominees, you may feel something missing: the meta-narrative surrounding the film at the time of the awards.

  • The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret (2018)

    The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Surely, I can’t be the only one who’s uneasy watching ripped-from-the-headlines crime documentaries? Oh, I’m fine with seeing powerful Hollywood figures finally facing justice for their crimes and terrible actions. And I’m fine with victims telling us their stories—truth will out, and truth cleanses. What I’m not too enthusiastic about is the idea of a documentary produced so soon after the events—before the verdicts, before the dust falling down, before being able to take a look at all of it and extract lessons and conclusions from it all. Veteran documentarian Barry Avrich takes on a topic that’s both touchy and obvious in The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret—starting with Harvey Weinstein in exploring a culture of sexual abuse within Hollywood. I say “obvious” because it’s been impossible to take in entertainment news since 2017’s #MeToo hashtag and ignore that several high-profile actors, directors, comedians and producers have been accused of sexual harassment and worse. Barely a few months later, The Reckoning is jockeying for relevance, with newspaper headlines still revealing details about the many accusations and ongoing investigations. At the same time, it’s a live wire of a topic—it illustrates not only the criminal actions of the accused, but also the bad behaviour of those around them that enabled, tolerated or ignored the sordid actions of the aggressors. But what we get is a sketch of what will eventually become the final story: As of this writing, Weinstein has just been convicted in New York state, and awaits another trial in California—meanwhile, other investigations are still pending on other accused abusers. As to what this means in general, we don’t know: the optimists believe this will help purge Hollywood of its offenders, while cynics state that the rot will always be there. Whoever’s right will only be determined much later, possibly in a documentary with more facts and conclusions at its disposal. Until then, The Reckoning, even as good as it is, feels like a newspaper—vital upon publication, but increasingly obsolete every following day.