I saw this last night, and loved it. I’d read an article about quad rugby a couple years ago, in the Houston Press, but it was hard to picture it. This documentary really made it come alive.
Watching the players tumble over in their wheelchairs, I did start to wonder if anyone had ever received another broken neck or otherwise serious injury playing.
Zupan and all the other players on the USA team seemed like really great guys. Joe seemed like an asshole up until his heart attack. My girlfriend informed me that if, on an anniversary, I respond to the toast “To you” with “To my sports team,” she will be pissed.
It did a lot to bring home the nature of disabilities to me, such as when Zupan was talking about going home for the first time out of rehab and seeing soccer shoes in his closet, or photographs of himself.
The glimpse of the Paralympics was fascinating. I want to know more about them now. The outcome of the quad rugby tournament was really surprising.
I saw it a couple of weeks ago. One of the assistant editors was in the audience. Oooh. It was a very cool movie. The ending could not have been better if it had been planned:
Suffice it to say, after concentrating on the grating rivalry between the US and Canadian teams, they are both denied the gold, which is won by the 6th ranked New Zeland team.
One could tell from the ‘final game’ that a lot of the hard shots and stuff were edited down froma lot of footage. Seems like hard impacts that spill a chair happen about every other game or so.
This sport should have more attention. Where is Wide World of Sports when we need it?
I saw the documentary a couple of months ago, and I agree: I’d love watching this on ESPN2 or whatever.
For what it’s worth, the movie hasn’t been doing well at the box office. Apparently the positioning is all wrong; some people are turned off by the weird title, some women aren’t going because they think it’s a dumb-jock movie, and others aren’t going because they don’t want to see treacly, sentimental glurge about handicapped people and their big, big hearts. If only they knew.
There was an article about this on CNN this week, which is what prompted me to haul my ass to a theater to see it before it left. As it recall it saying, it’s not doing badly for a documentary, but not as well as the creators expected given all the attention it received.
Part of the problem is apparently that it’s rated R. While I’m not glad that it’s not doing well-it’s an awesome movie, and loads of people should see it-I’m glad the filmmakers made it rated R rather than going for a PG or PG-13 by cutting out the players’ talk about sex.
