Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Goingbegging Once a fortnight on average, someone jumps to their death from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the most popular suicide spot in the western world. In 2004, Eric Steel decided to film the bridge for a solid year, in the hopes of capturing actual footage of people taking the plunge. To get permission from the National Park Service, he pretended he wanted to make a nature film. Well, we could say he succeeded, as the film reveals much about human nature, although we can sympathise with the protests of the NPS at this apparently shabby betrayal.The pre-title sequence, which actually looks not unlike a nature film full of beaches and seagulls, ends dramatically with a middle-aged man suddenly leaping from the bridge, though we don't catch more than about the first second of the four-second descent. For the rest of the film, we are kept wondering whether they ever did manage to shoot an entire jump, to be rewarded right at the end with a startling clip of a young man falling slowly backwards from the bridge and plummeting all the way to the water.Not surprisingly, the film divided critical opinion sharply. It was called everything from 'morally loathsome' to 'brutally honest', and someone even dubbed it an 'aesthetic whirlpool of horror, fascination, beauty, and resignation'. Many objected to the interviewing of the bereaved families before they were notified that their late kinsmen had been filmed in the act. But Steel claims that the families themselves were all in harmony with the project.My own feeling is that it was a cinematic moment that had to come sometime. Suicide is a curious taboo topic, sometimes treated as an obscenity. But this film might be viewed as a healthy airing of the subject. All the familiar themes are here, from pretend-suicide (the cry for help) to survivor-guilt, outright denial ("She must have tripped"), debate about suicide as a mortal sin, and the usual rather unedifying suicide notes. One of the mothers tells her son "You don't have a right to kill yourself while I'm alive." And he doesn't - until after her own death, when he says to a friend "Now I can end it all." And he does. There is also an interesting slant on the sheer notoriety of the location, 'a false romantic promise' that your death-leap will place you among the legendary figures of America. One reason why Scott kept his project secret is that he didn't want to attract attention-seekers trying to get their suicides immortalised, though one later jump was actually blamed on the film. On the other hand, the publicity caused the authorities to install a safety net, which may reduce both the casualty-count and the notoriety. The main, glaring fault is the overlapping of the stories, so that we often don't know which case (out of 24) is being discussed. Towards the end, there is an overlong and over-indulgent lament from one girl about some male victim, with no name to keep us in the loop - or not that I heard.Finally, against the odds, one of the 24 actually lived to tell the tale, apparently saved by a seal that buoyed-up his body at the crucial moment. He remains convinced that this was a biblical miracle in the full sense, and has been devoutly religious ever since.

tay-sedai I don't recall having heard about this documentary previously, but I just discovered it on Netflix, and immediately started watching it. It was very chilling seeing actual footage of suicides occurring from the Golden Gate Bridge, in particular that of Gene, whose footage we saw interspersed throughout the entire film.These people - who I mistakenly think of as characters, until I remember that they were real people and I was really seeing footage of them in their last moments - are people that anyone could know in their everyday life. And most of us have known at least someone who has made this sort of choice, so can relate to the pain those left behind are going through.This film seems to be not just about the suicides, but about the bridge itself - the bridge is almost a character in itself, and some of the footage of fog rolling in and obscuring the bridge is pretty eerie and haunting. It was very well done, and the subjects of the film were treated with respect and dignity.I found this film to be haunting, disturbing, upsetting, and also moving. I really felt for those who were interviewed in the aftermath, and could relate to their feelings.

bjacob This may be the worst docu I've ever seen.I tried to watch it with an open mind and I was ready to not assume a moralising attitude while faced with the premise of The Bridge, which is basically a modern snuff movie. But... like another commenter observed, at each jump you can almost feel the glee of the director about having wrapped a good shot, you can imagine the conversations of the cameramen, and it's not a nice thought. And the music choices, ohmygod.This film manages incredibly to bridge the gap between gratuitous, immoral shock value and extreme dullness. There's surprising little emotion in every single scene. There's no social discourse. There's virtually no insight on the people we see dying: the interviews vaguely mention depression, mental illness -- and to think that the interviewees weren't informed about the footage of the death of their loved ones, that's so crass and insensitive that defies belief. I see this film as incorporating everything that is bad in some media industry: exploitation, gimmicks, shock value, insensitivity and superficiality. I hope this director changes career.The only way The Bridge vaguely works, is in a perverse meta-discourse: the loneliness of the suicides is exemplified by the crassness of the movie itself. The environment that couldn't save them it's the very one that produces "art" such as this movie.

Mike Roman The Bridge is a 2006 documentary film by Eric Steel that purports to tell the stories of a handful of individuals who committed suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. The film was inspired by an article entitled 'Jumpers', which was written by Tad Friend and appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2003. The documentary caused significant controversy when Eric Steel revealed that he had tricked the Golden Gate Bridge committee into allowing him to film the bridge for months during which he captured 23 of 24 known suicides which took place there. In his permit application to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Steel said he intended 'to capture the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge'.Do not be fooled by the vacuous comments that have opened this film. This film is not about 'suicide' nor is it about 'painting a three-dimensional portrait of each jumpers last moments' (don't make me laugh) (see Gus van Sant's Last Days for a more evocative depiction of this). It is, rather, another hollow 'documentary' that has caused significant controversy with its apparent profiting from suicide.Using stop-motion photography with multiple cameras pointed at a notorious suicide spot on the bridge, an American Beauty soundscore, and some disillusioned Goth rocker's swan-song as a wraparound intended to increase suspense (excuse the pun), this vapid attempt at film-making has nothing whatsoever to do with 'objectivity' as one commenter stated, nor with the grimy reality that lies at the core of these somewhat final actions.As to 'lucid and enlightening insights' delivered by 'well-spoken and competent individuals' (according to reviews on IMDb) what we have in effect are carefully prepared scripts that convey a lack of authenticity. One also gets the feeling that some of the interviewees, relatives of the deceased, are too distracted by the camera and the thought of being in a film to concern themselves too deeply with the rather sensitive point in question. The tragedy with this 'documentary' was not in 'not helping these people from jumping' as some people have argued, but in profiting from it in such a shallow and insensitive manner. Admittedly, the director thought it might prove an excellent springboard with the delicate subject matter into the world of film and, as he was quoted saying: a career in movies.'Documentaries' like this are unbalanced, tainted (forget the 'objectivity' of our lead commenter - suicide has nothing to do with being objective, nor for that matter with stop-motion photography or kitschy slushy disco-pop), and cosmeticized to such a degree (look no further than the poster) that it loses any real value of the bare-bone realities of suicide before the opening credits have even appeared. What we have in effect then is a trashy take on 'suicide' that tries its best to wow audiences in the most over-simplistic and dumbed down fashion and which revels in these 'joyous jumps' (I can almost hear the camera crew saying 'just one more and we've got a wrap') and sensational faces of death which represent, as one of the few commentors that made any sense on this subject said, the 'money shots' in what is surely a grubbier film than any porno.The Bridge is not a documentary, nor does it even approach the accolade of film, rather it is just another example of puerile ideas exploited to further careers in what these people think is cinema, but is in effect, just another dirty little business intent on making money by whatever means possible.