dude. THIS is DEFINITELY the kind of coen brothers movie i've been waiting for.

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(SG)rrlfriend is born and raised here, and i've lived here for 17 years and consider it home. so we're definitely city snobs. likely as a second-hand result of that, we've recently been on a san-francisco-based-documentary kick, wrapping up "commune" (7/10 CLANKS!), "following sean," (8/10 CLANKS!) and "the wild parrots of telegraph hill" (9/10 CLANKS!) over the last month/month-and-a-half. the one sf doc she had no interest in seeing, though, was "the bridge."

the ggb holds many honors. for one thing, it gave lots of people lots of jobs during the great depression. pretty big one right there, says i. it is also perpetually hovering around the top of "world's most visited tourist destination," and "world's most photographed landmark" lists. it was a feat of engineering, and frankly, it's fucking beautiful. but the ggb holds one honor above all others and has never been anywhere but number one thus ... more people have chosen to end their lives at the golden gate bridge than any other place on earth. maybe it's because you can just walk out and hop over the railing. maybe it's because it's beautiful and serene. whatever the case, though, roughly 25 people jump every year. that's about one every 15 days. and very, VERY few survive the 750-foot plunge into the violent, shark-infested currents below. and that's what this movie chronicles. one year of suicides from the soaring span.

the filmmaker treaded a strange line here between perverse death-voyeur and revelation-driven documentarian. on the one hand, he was filming suicides. on the other, he was diving DEEP into the troubled souls of the bridge-jumpers through amazing interviews with family and friends, witnesses, people who intervened and saved potential jumpers, and in one case, a kid who jumped and survived it. so watching this, your mind is on a constant roller-coaster -- one moment you're in wide-eyed horror, witnessing a person's last seconds alive, while the next moment, you're listening to an intimate recollection of their lives leading up to that point. it's incredibly heart-wrenching in so many ways.

most intriguing to me were two interviews in particular. well, we'll call it three, for brand awareness' sake. one, the grandmother of jumper "gene." (i think she was the grandma. might have been an older family friend -- "auntie," if you will.) she knew that gene was going to kill himself. they'd talked about it. and her attitude about it was so strange. she accepted that reality, never forced herself into his dementia and depression, never once tried to tell him that he was "wrong" or "bad" for feeling like that was the best way out. she just loved him unconditionally while he was alive. as a result of that, you got the impression that they actually had probably the one relationship in his whole life that was worth a damn to him. she made him promise that he'd call and say goodbye if he ever did it. ... and he DID. jesus, i'm tearing up right now. ok, the second interview that really moved me was the parents of jumper "eric." (that might not be the right name.) again, here you have a family who knew that their child was going to end their own life, and found their solace in trying to eke the best from the limited time that they'd inevitably have with him. this was a troubling interview to see, if only because the father relayed conversations with his son about the son's impending suicide. "...when you do it..." and "...when you're gone..." were incredibly painful sections of conversation to know existed in this context. but this family, like gene's auntie, somehow inherently understood that they wouldn't be able to stop this. only to hold on to every moment they had. i never got the impression from either of these two interviews that they would have not intervened, given the chance, nor did i get the impression that they encouraged this. i found them to be incredibly enlightened, in fact, and i can't do them justice on a forum review, so just take my word on it.

the third poignant interview to me, perhaps the most so, was with a guy who intervened. he was taking pictures on the bridge one day when a grrl climbed over the rail. instead of just climbing and jumping, like most do, she climbed over and started milling about on the two-foot-wide ledge on the outside of the bridge's platform. and he, as a photographer, while he knew something was up, continued shooting. he describes it as when you're behind a camera, you're not really "there." and even though he knew he was shooting a likely suicide, he didn't stop to get involved for quite some time. i thought the moving images of the people jumping were deep, but they hold NOTHING compared to this kid's stills of the grrl outside the railing, holding flowers, leaning forward, contemplating the potential last few seconds of her life. THAT was some deep shit right there. anyway, he finally separated from himself and hauled her ass back over. also, i loved this interview cause he was from pittsburgh. and as previously determined, all good things come from pittsburgh.

watching the suicides is kind of wierd. i've seen plenty of death in my life, but i've never seen the transition point. i mean, i've seen animals die, and i've seen dead people, but i've never seen that second, with a person, where they're alive-then-not. i think that was my base reaction, at least with the first one they showed. but as the film went on, and i saw a handful more, i started seeing a LOT more. i was picking up on emotions that they were projecting. i was seeing deep, deep depression. but strangely, some of these people gave off a different sort of vibe. one guy in particular actually seemed to be happy. he was talking and laughing on the phone as he milled about by the edge. then he hung up, hopped over, made the sign of the cross (a strange dichotomy to me -- as i understand it, the christian deity frowns upon suicide), and leapt. it was as if he just did it like any other thing. no sort of dramatic final sigh or anything like that. maybe i'm naive, maybe that's the way it goes. but what i got from that, and from the 4 or 5 jumps that they showed in their entirety, was that there was no ceremony to it. (aside from jumping off the effing golden gate bridge, of course.) it was just ... what it was. it was ... plain. and bare. and final.

this movie takes a good bit of strength to watch at times. it's not all gory "faces of death" style shit, but they are showing people jumping 700+ feet to their deaths, so you can't get away from some emotional attachment.

i have to give this a 9/10 CLANKS! even though i'll never watch it again. it INVOLVED me and caused all manner of emotions, some conflicting, some not, to bubble to the surface. it got a reaction from me, and that's a success.

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See, that's cool, but I was originally raised-eyebrowed when I thought it said MARALYN MANSON was playing this female scientist. THAT would have been stunt casting!

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/con ... fd4184999d

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The design of the batman costume has always been the weakest link of these films. I freely admit I'd probably never be particularly comfortable with it unless it was the Batman Year One thing. But they did a reasonable job in Batman Begins. The mechanized version that appears at some point in this film, we must assume, has a functional reason for being designed so. But I still cannot get over that cowl.

http://www.empireonline.com/magazine/

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TRAILER

"most people respect the badge. EVERYONE respects the gun."

robert deniro
al pacino
curtis jackson (50 cent)
john leguizamo
donnie wahlberg
brian dennehy

and, in a major difference between the only other time pacino and deniro were in a film together -- this time, they're actually WORKING together. i'm so fucking stoked.

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NO ONE TOLD ME!

and I'm uber pissed at you guys....

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i've been really excited about the movie adaptation of the brilliant chuck palahniuk (author of "fight club")'s "choke," which i've read, and which i loved. well THE TRAILER'S out, and i'm ... lukewarm.

don't get me wrong, it looks good. sam rockwell is the shit, and anjelica huston is nothing short of amazing, but from the trailer, it feels more comic and less dark and twisted.

that stated, though, the book WAS darkly funny, so i remain in high hopes for it.

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Russian.
And, you know, Jolie is pregnant enough and has the famous pregnancy breasts going on, that it's easy to imagine that BEING her there...

http://www.filmz.ru/film/3448/video/

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I was reading this interview, about Kevin Durand's bloodspilling on Lost, and it mentioned, at the end, that he's playing BLOB in Wolverine. That's an AMAZING casting choice. And looking at his eyes and lips, i can totally see it, under prosthetics!

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television ... lost_N.htm

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Thats an interesting casting choice.
I've never heard her do an American accent.

She's sort of an amalgamation of Linda Hamilton and Headey....

http://www.moviehole.net/news/20080523_ ... ns_pr.html

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