Jumping Off Bridges

i had a chance to hear the director speak about the film at sxsw. she seemed like a genuine person, and i don't like giving this movie a poor review, but i'm not going to lie the thing was boring. the negative reviews i've read so far on here are a lot more accurate then the positives. the pacing is slow, the characters are hard to believe, and yeah, how did this movie even get accepted into this festival? so the movie is unflinching, big deal. original it's not. cassidy kids, another film that played at sxsw, also dealt with teenagers, and it was a complete 180 from this film in terms of originality and spirit. maybe i'm being too mean, but i agree that this film probably got into this festival because it was shot locally here in austin, tx. as an austinite, it was interesting seeing a lot of austin areas up on the screen, and a lot of the production qualities of this film were actually pretty decent. the story definitely needed work though, at an hour and a half it felt like 3 hours. bad thing when you're checking your watch constantly throughout a movie.

This was one of three films that I saw at South by Southwest this year (2006), and by far the least enjoyable. Didn't work for a number of reasons. First, an excruciatingly slow introduction. When the teens-dealing-with-suicide theme does finally get moving, the material is, quite honestly, embarrassing. I got the impression that the author of the material was trying to address something that was over her head. I have a teenage kid, but I have a hard time picturing him or any other teenager behaving quite the same way the characters in this film behave. It's more as if an adult psyche was being projected onto a kid. Who is this film going to appeal to? A teenager who can't relate to the main characters because of their behavior, or an adult who can't relate to these characters because of their age?

Bottom line - slow, amateurish, unbelievable.

Still, kudos to the crew of this film for completing something on a presumably small budget.

Few films handle the difficulties and complexities of teenager-dom as well as this one. Canlder has a unique ability to imbue her characters with depth and sensitivity without being overly sentimental or cliché. Great soundtrack. These characters are real. Lacking the false glamour and pretentious irony-filled self awareness of many teens in recent American films, Canlder's cast instantly brings you back to what it was to be in high school--the good and the not so good. The plot is wonderfully spare in its exposition, and the focus is on letting the characters stand on their own, complete with their imperfections and secrets. An excellent dialog starter for topics that many people simply don't want to go near or don't know how to begin.

I got to watch this at SXSW (3-11-06), and it was certainly a breath of fresh air. Most mainstream movies are glazed over with frosting. A lot of indie movies seem to stress unnecessarily long scenes with witty sarcasm. Jumping Off Bridges seemed to contain neither of those elements, because life isn't the way it is in movies.

The technical aspects of the movie are easy to handle. The costumes certainly looked real. When I saw the dad in his classroom, I giggled because everyone one of my math teachers dressed just the same. No one in the movie had hip, trendy clothes, and none of them looked alike. The neighborhood that everyone lived in was very much a normal neighborhood. Most movies seem to want to have everyone live in $200,000 homes where everyone has expensive cars and an endless supply of money. The students weren't driving Hummers, Lexus', or Range Rovers. The camera-work was pretty decent, coming from a photographer who pays extra attention to cropping, angles, lighting situations, depth of field, etc. The sound was also very good, especially the original music -- I love piano. The editing was also very good, coming from an editor who also pays close attention to editing in movies.

If you want movies like The Notebook, Forest Gump, Dumb and Dumber, crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, then you won't like this movie.

If you want movies like Pieces of April, Broken Flowers, I Am Sam (Sean Pess should have won the Oscar that year), then you will probably like this movie.

This movie is a stirring and heart rending portrayal of a teenager struggling to understand why a parent he loved would betray him and his family by committing suicide. all of us wonder why? Is it some sort of neural abnormality that people cannot handle their day to day challenges or is it something deeper, a lack of training and parental encouragement from birth on....that life happens and you have to discipline yourself to push on. How can a teen know....when a parent or other loved one, opts out of the struggle? None of us knows the mind of another, but the fragile and insightful look at this one teen, tells us that the human being is very complex and hard to reach. The relationships shown help us to realize that no matter what....all we have in the end is each other. Staying in touch is the most basic human instinct we have and the most precious. love is the thread for us all.