Film Reviews

GO SIR! NO SIR! Director David Zeiger’s superb documentary about the Vietnam War era’s GI protest movement is jammed with incident and anecdote and moves with nearly as much breathless momentum as the movement itself, which was spurred along by mimeographed fliers and newspapers written by soldiers and secretly distributed on bases and battlefields. Such rebellion within the ranks stunned military brass and got more than one GI court-martialed and sentenced to years in prison. Several of those men appear here, in interviews juxtaposed against remarkable archival footage of their respective protests and arrests. Elsewhere, Zeiger’s film — which probably doesn’t have a Fox News Channel airing in its future — offers glimpses of the anti-war stage shows organized (by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, among others) as counterpoint to Bob Hope’s boost-the-troops extravaganzas, plus wrenching testimony from the 1971 “Winter Soldier” hearings in Detroit, at which more than 100 combat vets spoke publicly about what they’d seen and done in Vietnam. Although it reverberates with resonance to our current misadventure, Sir! No Sir! should stand the test of time, not just for its captivating history lesson, but for its dispelling of many a myth, from the one about returning vets being spat on at the San Francisco airport, to the one that says an individual acting from conscience can’t manage to change the world. (One Colorado; Monica 4-Plex) (Chuck Wilson)

STICK IT In this uneven teen sports drama, 17-year-old Haley Graham (a dynamic Missy Peregrym) gets caught doing dirt-bike backflips in the pool of someone else’s Texas estate, ends up in front of a judge and is sent not to juvie, but to a gymnastics training academy. Haley, it turns out, is a star gymnast who walked out of a championship meet for unknown reasons and now harbors a rebel’s contempt for the sport, her teammates and her new coach (Jeff Bridges, who must’ve had a reason). Screenwriter-turned-director Jessica Bendinger (Bring It On) employs all manner of jazzy camera pyrotechnics to pump up the film’s first third, including a witty aerial montage of gymnasts spinning and entwining themselves around each other like Busby Berkeley dancers. But once Haley and company head for the nationals, Bendinger can no longer disguise the fact that she’s working with a sport that isn’t terribly cinematic, and a lead character whose “secret” is so dramatically mundane that it’s hardly worth the fuss. The final meet felt eternal to me, but little girls may love it all, and even if they don’t, they’re almost sure to practice their handstands when they get home. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)