BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Koch-Lorber Films
MSRP: $26.98
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 94 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Behind-the-scenes featurette
• PSA from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeilne

The Pitch

"Ever
had a really bad day? I mean a really
bad day? Probably not this bad."

The Humans

The sort
of men and women who usually end up nameless to everyone but those who loved
them, given a strength of memory by director Eric Steel.

The Nutshell

San Francisco‘s Golden Gate Bridge hosts the world’s largest volume
of suicides per year. For one of those years, Eric Steel and his crew set up
their cameras, trained them on the bridge, and caught several suicides and
attempted suicides. The filmmakers then set up interviews with the surviving
family and friends to create final portraits of the men and women who took
their lives into their own hands and smashed them.

The Lowdown

This is
something of a perfect storm review for me. I have to disclose first thing that
I became deeply emotional during this film, with good reason. I suffer from a
clinically-diagnosed depression, for which I take medication and undergo
therapy. I’m far from unique in my condition, but I wanted to make clear that
Steel’s mature and guileless exploration of suicide hit me on the experiential
level, which could very well color my opinion of the film. I have a tendency to
fawn over any fiction or nonfiction that presents such mental illnesses as a
disease rather than a scene.

I also
made the mistake of viewing The Bridge on a day in between meds.

It would
be easy, then, for me to ascribe a great weight to Steel’s film. I won’t,
deliberately, because this is a documentary completely unconcerned with
assuming such importance. It’s a film almost without thesis, without
communicated concern beyond filling its frames with raw humanity. There’s no
interference by the filmmakers. Those who loved the suicides, after their own
fashion, speak their candid, baffled, broken stories. And, in a decision sure
to raise a dissonant note of ethical concern, there is no interaction with the
suicides themselves (barring the one failed attempt) apart from observing their
bodies and distant, blurry faces tumbling from the rails.

As a film
concerned with the distances that stretch between people, The Bridge does two
things remarkably well: Displaying the humanity of its interview subjects, and
ascribing humanity to the suicides. The skill necessary to create a texture of acceptance,
denial, anger, and more out of brief interviews with people of no special
import can’t be overlooked. In the interview segments, Steel and his crew
capture a startling amount of insight into the lives of the survivors and, one
step removed, into those of the suicides. The editing deserves a lot of the
credit, here. The different subjects are balanced throughout the film, picking
up with one of the suicides, intercutting with another, concluding the first
and moving to a third; it’s a complicated layering of individuals, and it works
wonders. While some of those individuals reach no greater insight than that
their suicide is in a better place, the creation of context within the film lends
even those small clichés an air of wisdom, as one part of a larger
understanding.

I was
consistently spellbound by Steel’s ability to penetrate the emotions of his
subjects, but even moreso by what is built out of the suicides themselves. We
get to see them wandering back and forth on the bridge. They lean over the
railings; they wave aside concerned passers-by; they prepare; they lose their
courage. They jump. These sequences look like the sort of things you’d find
drifting through the seas of viral videos online, but when watching The
Bridge you feel no cheap thrill. Your heart picks up, but it’s out of
sympathy for the human being, out of recognition of the strange, contorted
logic that has rewired their brains.

You know
that feeling where you want to scream at a fictional character to do something
differently? This time, Lancelot, don’t fail your king. This time, Hamlet,
don’t listen to your uncle. I predict you will never feel that moreso than when
one of Steel’s subjects vaults the railing, pauses for half a second, then
shoves clear.

By
imbuing such a spirit of humanity in these subjects, Steel has done something that
I think is both quiet and important. Suicide, as an extension of depression or
other mental illnesses, isn’t well understood by society at large. It’s an
anomaly, usually attributed to selfishness, when a motivator can be attached at
all. Here, Steel has done the best thing he can to communicate to a wide
audience: he has put human faces on a complicated subject. We can relate to
real humans, and Steel portrays them well, the living and the dead.

As an
educational tool, it’s also worth noting that the one surviving suicide attempt
is given extensive coverage in the latter third of the film, and has a lot to
share about the specifics of bipolar disorder. "Bipolar" is one of
those buzzwords , one of the chic diagnoses going around these days, but here
you’ll find a succinct example of how it affects a life and how it can be
contained.

I’m
finding that the other notes I’ve taken on this film all relate to me,
personally, and aren’t really suited for this review. This film has been on my
mind for a solid week, now, as I’ve dug for the words to give it proper
consideration. I will be encouraging as many people as I can to watch this, as
an example of how compelling nonfiction can be, and how such minimal strokes
can be used to illuminate a cloudy subject.

The Package

There’s
nothing much to accompany the film, apart from a behind-the-scenes featurette
and a public service announcement from the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline.

9 out of 10

Because it stars Simon Pegg, we’ve been following the casting news for How To Lose Friends And Alienate People pretty closely. In addition to Pegg, Jeff Bridges, Kirsten Dunst, Gillian Anderson and Danny Huston are all on board the Robert B. Weide-directed adaptation of Toby Young’s memoir about being a total loser with an English accent working a short stint at Vanity Fair.

Now the Auto-hott Megan Fox has joined the cast, reportedly as a young actress…er, starlet, getting her first experience in the big time. Judging from her performance in Transformers, she’s perfectly suited for the role, which will likely involve standing around at parties looking incredibly hot. That’s it. I got nothing else. Look at the picture, alright?

Shoot ‘Em Up is one of those movies that sounds like pure DTV material: the film, from the writer of Double Dragon who also happens to be the director of Monster Man, is about "a mysterious loner who teams up with an unlikely ally to protect a newborn baby from a determined criminal who hunts them throughout the bowels of the city."

Latino Review exclusively has the first three teaser character posters. Personally, all testosterone aside, I think the Giamatti image is the best. But I could tell you that the images cause cancer of the duodenum and you’d still click through to see the full size Bellucci image, I’m sure, so just click here and do it.

For most actors the dilemma about taking a superhero franchise role is whether or not that part will typecast them forever. Brandon Routh, meanwhile, is just worried about get cast – the guy’s career has been suspiciously quiet ever since Superman Returns came out. It’s been a year since that movie was released and he’s done nothing except for a part in the ensemble film Life Is Hot in Cracktown. And with The Man of Steel starting – if it does – next year, Routh still has nothing else big coming up.

In the end Routh knows nothing more about Justice League than we do, and possibly less than some journalists, to be frank. There was talk of a Superman curse, but who knew that this time it would kill a man’s career?

BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Danger After Dark
MSRP: $24.98
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 83 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:

• English Subtitles
• Photo Gallery
  
• Trailer

The Pitch

How do you say ‘poop’ in Greek? To Kako.

The Humans

Meletis Georgiadis. Yannis Katsambas. Andreas Kontopoulos. Pepi Moschovakou. Argiris Thanasoulas. Mykeyboardis Takingabeating.

This MAY have been shot on video.

The Nutshell

Greek television finally got Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later (which I assume was known as XXVIII Days Later over there*). People who knew how to do special effects were watching and decided to emulate, filmmaking chops be damned. The result is To Kako,
which never would have been released had it not come from Greece. It’s
like when a ballplayer makes it to the major leagues simply because
he’s Australian or something.

"Let’s parade the oddball out, see what happens."

"And the winner, by split decision…"

The Lowdown

"You’ve given us a mouthful of Greek Salad." – Joe Pilato, Day of the Dead

The plot of the movie involves people going batshit and biting the living piss out of each other.
Hirsute male and female zombie sorts shamble about and try to hurt the
innocent, but lo and behold, people are there to kill them in ways that
are inventive if you’ve been in stasis since 1974. I don’t mean to be
rude, but it’s apparent from frame one that this is a movie built
entirely around a few remotely inventive kills and an editing technique
that seems the bastard offspring Run Lola Run and an episode of 24.
Without the savvy. Shot on video, the film features tons of split
screens and fast cuts and it seems as if the goal seems as much to be
as much about unleashing jets of blood in the air (a favorite of To Kako,
I counted at least five lingering shots of torsos shooting little red
bloodfarts) and jagged editing techniques as it is about delivering
horror. Actually, there isn’t much horror. Just people running about,
sitting about, and delivering awkwardly choreographed second death to
non-actors.

Corey won the gold medal in squash.

That’s
really it. A few people in a cave get attacked by a first-person
cameraman and go batshit. People go batshit at supper. People go
batshit at a futbol game. A few boring people (including the Jennifer
Grey of Greece) band together to fight the evil and we as an audience
look at our watch and wait for either the end credits or the merciful
Grim Reaper to take us home. It is a bad movie. A dumb movie. Proof
positive that though every single person on Earth thinks they have the
definitive zombie movie in their head or at least a great contribution
to the genre, more often than not they have Jack Elam at best.

Fuck Evil. It’s a formula zombie flick. The worst formula ever.

"δίγαμμα δίγαμμα, δίγαμμα Shitstuffs" …………………. "κάππα ήτα ἄλφα!"
"I did what you asked, now please no more To Kako" …… "Can’t afford shoes!"

The Package

"You’ve given us a mouthful of Greek Salad." – Patron of Mellow Mushroom Pizza

There
are thankfully almost no special features on this DVD, a fact I am so
proud of. Typically, no-budget horror flicks that suck the life from a
man have 11 commentary tracks, 9 documentaries, and a photo gallery of
everything everyone did on the set every day. This one just has the
film and some photos and a trailer.

I hate this movie a lot.

2.5 out of 10

Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs (based on a screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan) is one of this year’s highly-touted "Let’s Talk About Terrorism" movies. It is a tripartite narrative juxtaposing both political and academic wrangling over the country’s foreign policy against the plight of two Army Rangers who idealistically enlisted after 9/11. As the soldiers fight for their lives in hostile territory, a politician (Tom Cruise) and a reporter (Meryl Streep) fiercely debate American foreign policy while a Poly Sci professor harangues a student eager to drop out of school to join the military.

*That much of what is said in this trailer is right doesn’t mean it can’t be written in a manner that isn’t thoroughly cliched.

Did you happen to see that disheveled, pantsless, cake-smeared individual doing the Charleston down Barham this morning? No, no, no… not Tim Conway. The other one who looked a little like Jim Carrey in the middle of a Martin Lawrence-scale meltdown. I’m pretty sure that was actually Jim Carrey.

*And that Michel Gondry "in talks" credit at the IMDb is not based in any reality I’m a part of.

Yesterday I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the Warner Bros screening room in midtown Manhattan. It was the first ever New York screening, at 2 in the afternoon, and it was the day after school let out for the summer, so the screening room was packed with kids (all very well-behaved, by the way). I settled into my seat and a fellow critic sat down next to me. I’m not going to reveal the guy’s name here, but he’s well-known and has been in the business a long, long time. We’re also colleagues in a critic group here in New York, and I’ve found him to be a nice enough guy, all things considered and despite his bitchy rep.

I’m not looking to embarrass this guy, especially since he may see the film again before reviewing it. That said, if his review ends up being especially clueless, I’ll be sure to link you to it and out him.

Principal photography on Iron Man is finished; I’m kind of excited to see what Paramount is going to bring to Comic Con. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for ‘dude in the Iron Man suit,’ but I’ll settle for neat footage. Meanwhile, we’ve been chastised for not running the news that Hillary Swank is doing a cameo in the movie, but let’s be honest, Hillary Swank is in the Cuba Gooding Jr school of actors who fuck up after Oscar wins. Who cares if she’s doing a cameo in the movie? That scene will likely be the worst in the film, unless she’s playing herself on a date with Tony Stark and she says what a crybaby Chad Lowe is. Then I will give this film a 10/10 score.

Our own Jeremy Smith was on the set of Iron Man, so here’s hoping that Paramount lets him write something up soon. I’m sure you’re going to like what he has to say.

If Devin wasn’t moving to L.A. in the next couple of weeks, he might have been able to cover this year’s 45th annual New York Film Festival, in which case he would have been among the first to see Wes Anderson’s new The Darjeeling Limited, which opens the festival on September 28.

The film will get a New York release on September 29 courtesy of Fox Searchlight. Now let’s have a trailer. Please?