~ LATEST REVIEWS ~

The Bridge

In 2004, 24 people committed suicide by jumping off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the world's most popular location for jumpers. Director Eric Steel used multiple mini-DV cameras to capture almost everyone who jumped off the bridge that year, as well as others who were pulled to safety from the easily accessible outer railing. This disturbing footage is mingled with recollections from surviving friends and relatives, who recount what led to their loved ones' fatal plunge. But none of the individual stories places such desperation within a greater social context or makes us think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Without a takeaway message, these poor souls perform for no other purpose than as a testament to proper camera placement. Unlike the 2003 New Yorker article that inspired him, Steel interviews no experts, so we're left with sorrow in a vacuum and the voyeuristic, guilt-tinged thrill of witnessing something completely outside normal experience.

The best passages chronicle those who defied death: A would-be jumper is photographed by a Pittsburgh man who then rescues her; an 18-year-old survives the jump with the help of a seal. By the end, we're no closer to understanding the bridge's suicidal appeal, except to suppose that its grandeur and permanence are commensurate with the act. Steel's film is powerful and upsetting, but as pointless as suicide itself. (Mark Keizer) (Laemmle's Regent Showcase, Laemmle's Monica 4, Laemmle's Playhouse 7)

Catch a Fire

Derek Luke stars in the apartheid-era true story of Patrick Chamusso, a soft-spoken family man and hard-working refinery foreman, who, after being wrongly accused of sabotage and tortured for information he doesn't have, abandons his life of relative safety to join the anti-apartheid efforts of the African National Congress, effectively becoming precisely the kind of threat the government's heavy-handed efforts were designed to thwart. (The plot is not entirely dissimilar to that of the forthcoming German Oscar entry, The Lives of Others.)

Four years after his resurrection as a filmmaker of conscience with Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American, action maven Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger) tackles yet another period tale with present-day ramifications. Otherwise obvious parallels to the Iraqi insurgency and the current war on terror diverge on key moral points related to methods and aims, forcing audiences to wrestle with some difficult but ultimately powerful affirmations about truth, justice, and the means for attaining a just society. While this is far and away the best performance Luke has ever given, it's Tim Robbins, in a superbly nuanced turn as anti-terror chief Nic Vos, who seems most likely to capture year-end accolades.

Shawn Slovo, who previously scripted her own upbringing as the child of famous South African anti-apartheid activists in A World Apart, erases the unfortunate memory of her other screenwriting effort – the adaptation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin – with this top-flight script, once again handling a subject she knows well. (Her father, to whom the picture is dedicated, is a minor but significant presence in the film.) (Wade Major) (Citywide)

Conversations with God

Neale Donald Walsch (Henry Czerny) loses his job following a car accident and is left homeless, moving into a lakeside campsite outside of Ashland, Oregon. There he makes friends with a pair of twinkle-eyed homeless guys (Abdul Salaam El Razzac and Bruce Page) and starts looking for work. No job as a Starbucks barista for our Mr. Walsch: He's only interested in working as a DJ at the local radio station. He eventually gets a gig on the air, but loses the job almost immediately – at which point God suddenly starts dictating advice to him that makes him millions of bucks.

Perhaps the most devoted fans of Walsch's self-help philosophy books will be able to glean some pleasure from director Stephen Simon's stiff, ponderous biography, but Eric Delabarre's numbingly stilted screenplay is couched in stock rags-to-riches clichés, and the film's worshipful tone is downright disturbing, particularly when compared with the near-negligible dramatic impact of the storyline. Even more unsettling are the zombie-like, borderline campy performances, particularly by Czerny, who, with his stiff gait, madman beard, and dead eyes, offers a turn that puts one in mind of the Unabomber by way of the Dybbuk. (Paul Birchall) (Beverly Center 13, Landmark's Westside Pavilion, Laemmle's One Colorado)

Death of a President

“I'm sure you all remember where you were on the fateful day of October 19, 2007, when George W. Bush was assassinated after a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago … .”: It sounds like the setup for a particularly tasteless joke, but it's the premise of Brit director Gabriel Range's faux documentary, which set off quite the controversy at the Toronto Film Festival last month. The uproar can be explained only as idiotic hysteria: Range's film clearly doesn't support Bushicide, nor is there anything else particularly shocking about this little alternate-universe exercise. It has a couple of droll moments, including a Syrian émigré, clearly patterned on Ahmad Chalabi, insisting (with no evidence) that his former country ordered the hit; and paeans to Bush's decisiveness and bravery from his aides – exactly the sort of mythologizing horse pucky those people would be spouting for this film, if the event were real. Range seamlessly blends news footage with his own staged material, including a technically astonishing sequence of Cheney delivering his former boss's eulogy. Mostly, the film serves as a reminder of the top 10 reasons that Bush's violent death is the last thing his most vehement detractors should hope for: 1. President Cheney. 2. Patriot III. 3. President Dick Cheney. 4. Elevation to martyr status. 5. The subsequent whitewashing of his catastrophic record. 6. President holy-shit-it's-Dick Cheney. 7. Validation of expanded presidential powers. 8. Scapegoating of the usual suspects. 9. Excuse for clamping down on political opponents. 10. Have I mentioned President motherfuckingdick Cheney? (Andy Klein) (Pacific ArcLight, Landmark's Westside Pavilion, Laemmle's Monica 4, Laemmle's Town Center 5, Laemmle's Playhouse 7, Laemmle's Fallbrook 7)

Excellent Cadavers

Marco Turco's documentary about attempts to rout the Mafia in Sicily, the group's native land and still its stronghold, is based on the book by Italian-American journalist Alexander Stille. (Slightly confusingly, the same book was the source of director Ricky Tognazzi's identically titled 1999 fictional feature, some footage from which is used here to dramatize events that, by definition, wouldn't have been recorded in reality.) The Italian government had always turned an almost blind eye to the organization, which, not coincidentally, had members in high positions within that government. During a major turf upheaval, as members of the rural families from – I kid you not – Corleone are seizing Palermo from their softer urban counterparts, two magistrates named Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino got serious, gathering evidence until they could stage the “Maxi-trial” – in which literally hundreds of mafiosi were tried together in a huge, specially built bunker.

But eventually the government in Rome undercut the magistrates' authority and didn't give them resources to do their jobs or to protect themselves. (Falcone's murder, it should be said, was so spectacularly executed as to have arguably been unpreventable.) And then Berlusconi's extreme right-wing party took over and started undoing all that was accomplished, since (big surprise) his party is pals with the mob. Turco's recounting of all this, through Stille's narration, numerous well-subtitled talking heads, and newsreel footage, at first seems a little overly detailed for those not already familiar with the subject; but, by a third of the way through, it becomes compulsively watchable. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle's Grande 4)

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

It's hard to know which was more shocking: the video that amazingly survived in November 1978, showing enforcers from Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple gunning down U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, his aides, and accompanying newspeople in a move of insane desperation; or the video from a few days later, as officials entered Jones's Guyana compound and discovered more than 900 corpses, already bloating in the South American heat – corpses of Jones followers who had, willingly or under duress, consumed poisoned punch.

For his must-see documentary, Stanley Nelson has interviewed a few journalists and Ryan staff members, as well as former members of the Temple, who either bailed before the move to Guyana (which took place hours before a scathing exposé about Jones's corruption and cultish ways was about to hit newsstands) or escaped into the jungle or, like Jones's adopted son Jim Jr., just happened to be elsewhere when Jones's paranoid “final solution” took place. Jones's initial vision fused old-time evangelical preaching and singing with a quite reasonable left-wing agenda of racial and economic equality that garnered him support from the Bay Area left (including, for a while, yours truly). But, even if some of his talk was genuine, he was already indulging an Elmer Gantry-like double life, violating everything he preached, even while maximizing his power as a leader. (Andy Klein) (Nuart)

Romeo and Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss

Yes, once again, it's the tale of those two star-crossed lovers – except this time they're animated talking harbor seals, their love affair takes place on some kind of a surreal, purple, Big Sur-like cartoon beach, and it ends happily. In Phil Nibbelink's commendably ambitious animated film, Romeo and Juliet, members of feuding seal families, meet at a party held aboard a wrecked ship and wind up getting married by Friar Lawrence, who seems to be some kind of wizard fox with magic powers. Complications ensue when Juliet's dad proposes to marry off his daughter to the huge Prince of the Seals, who has green glowing breath and grunts like a pig.

The film is clearly a labor of love for Nibbelink, who started work on it in 2003, but the mood sails awkwardly between that of a direct-to-video release and a bad acid trip. The seals' antics are broad and manic, but they're rather tame and unexceptional by the standards of Ice Age or Finding Nemo. Meanwhile, the animators' color palette of purple backgrounds and lurid and murky reds, combined with bland yellow and white characters in the foreground, don't make for especially beautiful images. The animation is undistinguished, a problem hampered by Bard-daptor Nibbelink's utterly forgettable dialogue and songs. The film possesses some cute elements, but its sensibility is too tired for even the least demanding youngster. (Paul Birchall) (Beverly Center 13, Culver Plaza 6, Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15, AMC Burbank Town Center 8)

Shut Up & Sing

When Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines famously announced from a London stage in 2003 that her band was “ashamed that the president is from Texas,” a well-coordinated backlash against the country-music superstars ensued. In this documentary, directors Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream) and Cecilia Peck examine what speaking one's mind can do to an American's livelihood; free speech can be costly. They film the trio living in the media-hurricane's eye of three years ago, as well as watching them record Taking the Long Way, the first album released since the controversy started. The cameras catch the women's initial moments of shock and disbelief at becoming red-state pariahs and receiving death threats, as well as having what they hold dear – their ability to play music for a living – threatened forever. That shock eventually turns to defiance and, later, strength; the trio starts recording material written primarily by themselves for the first time. Maines, fiery and mercurial, runs the gamut of emotions over what her words have wrought for bandmates Martie Maguire and Emily Robison (and their husbands and children), but she never wavers in her view of politics, the country-music establishment, and the war in Iraq. Movingly, Shut Up & Sing shows how, once the initial impact wore off, the trio grew closer together as friends than ever before. One's opinion of the Dixie Chicks' music or their comments may not change, but it's impossible to watch this feature and not leave respecting the integrity and decency of the three women. (Joshua Sindell) (AMC Century 15)

ALSO OPENING THIS WEEK

Hollywood. Another indie about young folk struggling to become actors in the titular district of our own dear city. The cast includes Rick Rose (who also wrote, directed, and coproduced), Tod Purvis, Bethany Plummer, Martini Paratore, Valerie Swift-Bird, Katherine Azarmi, and Jay Rondot. (AK) (Laemmle's Sunset 5)

Saw III. How many times can this same killer get away with tormenting more victims with his oh-so-clever games? Will this never end? (Please … .) Shawnee Smith, Tobin Bell, Bahar Soomekh, and Angus Macfadyen star in the latest installment. Saw II director Darren Lynn Bousman returns for another go-round, with series creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan behind the word processors. (AK) (Citywide)