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Michelle
Mar 13, 05 - 12:07 PM |
Murderball
This is the next documentary I am looking forward to seeing. It has great buzz and just the description captures my interest. I read about it in EW in the reviews of the films at Sundance this year.
Murderball
"Welcome to the world of international “quad rugby,” in which quadriplegic athletes ride around in fortified wheelchairs scoring points and smashing into opponents. The U.S. team ruled the roost before being beaten in 2003 by Team Canada, coached by Joe Soares, a former U.S. star who, after having been cut from the squad, vowed revenge. Can the U.S. make a comeback or is it Team Canada’s time? A heart-stopping sports thriller, Murderball is a fascinating look into the daily lives of the players and their relationships with their families, friends, and lovers. Co-directors Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro were given remarkably intimate access to their subjects, and the result is a powerful group portrait of uncommon sensitivity and insight. USA, 2005, 85 min. A THINKFilm release."
I like those short feature films. And doesn't it just sound riveting? A friend gave rave reviews to me of that documentary that won the Oscar about children growing up in brothels in India...um, Born Into Brothels. I will see that eventually too. But upon hearing of Murderball, I felt the way I felt the first time I heard of Some Kind of Monster, Super-size Me and The Five Obstructions. I know I will like it.
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Michelle
Apr 20th, 2005 - 10:00 PM |
Re: Murderball
I saw it, I loved it, couldn't stop talking about it or thinking about it for days. I wrote a tiny bit more about the experience in my Pop Blog.
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Michelle
Jul 7th, 2005 - 6:59 PM |
Murderball Opens 7/8/05 in NYC, Meet Filmmakers and Athletes
In NYC, you can catch it at Sunshine Cinemas (Landmark Theatres):
Dear FiLM Club Member,
This weekend, the Sunshine introduces you to MURDERBALL:
“If this documentary about the sport of quadriplegic rugby were just another profile in courage of athletes who have triumphed over disability, it would still be an inspirational crowd pleaser. But it’s deeper than that. Murderball, as it was originally called, is a contact sport played on a basketball court by rival teams equipped with armored wheelchairs. Spanning two years and culminating with the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, the movie focuses on the intense rivalry between the United States and Canadian teams, a competition made all the more bitter by the fact that the Canadian coach, Joe Soares is a former American star. The film explores Mr. Soares’s home life and his troubled relationship with his 12-year-old son. Among the players, the movie devotes the most attention to Mark Zupan, the charismatic American team leader who was disabled by a freakish accident in a car driven by his best friend. The film provides a lot of information about quadriplegics, even about their sex lives. And as much as it applauds the players’ fighting spirit, it delivers an unspoken critique of rampant sports mania and an obsession with winning that can wreak personal havoc off the playing field.” - Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 5/8/05
***The filmmakers Henry-Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro and Jeff Mendel, as well as star Mark Zupan will be here for a Q&A after the 9:20 show on Friday 7/8! And on Saturday 7/9 filmmaker Henry-Alex Rubin will be here for a Q&A after the 9:20 show! Buy your tickets in advance on moviefone.***
As always, if you have questions about this email or comments about the Sunshine, please drop me a line.
-Damien damienf@landmarktheatres.com
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Michelle
Jul 7th, 2005 - 7:02 PM |
Murderball in Entertainment Weekly 7/05
I read a good article in this week's EW and found it online at ew.com:
Part I:
Hard Ball
The star of ''Murderball'' -- Mark Zupan talks about what's poised to become the next breakout documentary, a movie about quadriplegic rugby players by Karen Valby
When Mark Zupan was 18 years old, he walked out of a bar and passed out drunk in the bed of his best friend's pickup truck. A couple hours and many rounds later, his buddy put his key in the ignition and headed home. He had no idea Zupan was asleep in the back. When his truck spun out of control on a Florida highway, Zupan was launched into a canal. He woke up when he hit the water, and started crying after he realized he couldn't get his legs to work. Help wasn't coming. So Zupan grabbed on to a branch and held on through a long night, red ants nesting between his fingers, and kept holding on through morning rain showers. Thirteen and a half hours he hung on to that **** branch, until a stranger on his lunch break spotted Zupan's eyes and nose and arm poking out above the water and called 911. The doctors told the Division I college-scholarship soccer player that his neck was broken and that he would never walk again.
How's this for a Hollywood comeback story? Zupan, the charismatic heart of the chest-thumper documentary Murderball (which opens in New York and L.A. on July 8 before expanding to theaters across the country), is poised to become one of summer's biggest and unlikeliest action-movie stars. ''When you meet Zupan, he almost seems like a superhero,'' says Murderball's first-time filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro. ''And the wheelchair is his cape.''
Shapiro first learned about quadriplegic rugby, or ''murderball'' as it's gleefully referred to by devotees, after reading a squib about the sport in a local Arizona paper. After talking to star forward Zupan and other players on the phone, he pitched the story to Maxim magazine (it ran in November 2002). But before heading off to the world championships in Sweden, Shapiro, realizing he had the potential makings of a movie, enlisted the camera skills of codirector Henry-Alex Rubin (Who Is Henry Jaglom?). ''The premise sounded horrible,'' admits Rubin. ''If there was a documentary about disabled people on TV, I'd want to switch the channel to CSI. But you meet these guys and they just completely subvert every cliché you've ever had about someone in a wheelchair. They listen to speed metal, they drink Jägermeister, they pop Viagra, they have hot girlfriends, they play poker, they call each other gimps and cripples. And Zupan, he's a filmmaker's wet dream. That guy is so brutally honest, there's not a fake bone in his body.''
They spent the next two and a half years following the U.S. team as it prepared for the ultimate showdown with archrival Canada at the 2004 Paralympics. Before they left for Athens to shoot the movie's climax, THINKFilm, flush from recent successes with documentaries like Spellbound and the Oscar-winning Born Into Brothels, invested just under a million dollars in Murderball after seeing a three-minute promotional reel. ''Even in that brief dose, your preconceptions were shattered,'' says THINKFilm's head of U.S. distribution, Mark Urman, ''and that to me has always equaled box office. It's visceral, it's entertaining, it has huge personalities, and there's also that 'Yes, I know' factor. 'Yes, I know you don't want to see a film about handicapped people. Get over it.'''
The star of ''Murderball''
After Murderball premiered at Sundance, where it won the Documentary Audience Award, MTV Films partnered with THINKFilm to lend the movie its marketing muscle. (Look for Zupan to face off against Johnny Knoxville in an upcoming MTV special.) Recently, Zupan, 30, ran into Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock at a New York City bar. The director introduced himself, bought Zupan a Crown and Coke, and congratulated him on being the star of the next big documentary.
''People are like, 'Oh, you did so great in the film!''' laughs Zupan. ''But f---, I didn't do anything. This is my life.''
A coupld of years after his accident, Zupan got his first tattoo, a panther on his back. He liked the feeling of the needle so much that the panther now snakes around his right arm into a web of intricate design and his left calf is covered with more ink. His head is shaved and he's got a goatee and he drives a Dodge Durango with the help of this neat lever on the steering wheel that allows him to control the pedals with his left hand. He has pretty good mobility in both arms, but he's missing some trunk muscles and his right hand is bent funny. ''People see the movie and think, 'Oh, you filmmakers have your subject matter wrong!''' says Zupan. '''They're just paraplegics.' No, you f---ing buffoons, quadriplegia means impairment in all four limbs, not complete immobility.''
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Michelle
Jul 7th, 2005 - 7:05 PM |
Re: Murderball
Part II
Murderball at ew.com
Today, Zupan's a civil engineer in Austin and owns a three-bedroom house that he lives in with his girlfriend, Jessica Wampler. There are dirty bachelor-party invitations on the fridge, a kiddie pool in the backyard for their boxer, D.O.G., to splash around in, and a poster of Ben Harper above the fireplace. ''Did you see that movie Sideways?'' asks Zupan, as he downs a glass of chocolate milk. ''I thought it was kind of blah. I mean, here's this guy who's bitter because his wife left him. After a while, it's like, 'F---ing get over it, dude.' Yeah, it sucks. Get over it.''
Zupan's steely resilience is remarkable, but he acknowledges a brutal two-year period of adjustment. ''You're 18 years old, but you're in an infant's body again,'' he remembers. ''You have to learn everything over. How to s---, how to ***** how to eat.'' Six days after the accident, Pearl Jam released the CD Vs. and he listened to the song ''Indifference'' — ''Oh I will stand arms outstretched, pretend I'm free to roam/Oh I will make my way through one more day in hell'' — over and over again on repeat. He started going to the gym again, strapping weights to his hands so he could burn off some of his anger through lifting.
''Of course I was ****** off that I was in a chair,'' says Zupan. ''But you eventually have to decide to devote your energy toward something besides trying to get out of the chair.'' He discovered quad rugby in 1996 and says the sport saved his life. Murderball shows Zupan and his elite teammates at their wild-eyed, chair-pounding, trash-talking best. ''Zupan seems like he was born in that chair,'' says Shapiro. ''You don't see what he lost.'' So the filmmakers include a newly injured young man's story line to remind audiences of that terribly vulnerable early stage all these guys had to get past.
Twenty-four-year-old Keith Cavill crushed his spine in a motocross accident and let Shapiro and Rubin film his early days of recovery. ''I heard I broke my neck,'' he says, ''so I was waiting for the doctors to put it back together again so I could get on with my life. I had four or five different doctors who would come into my room and say, 'Move your hands.' 'I can't.' 'Move your arms.' 'I can't.' 'Move your legs.' 'I can't.' 'Move your feet.' 'I can't.' 'Okay, you're a quadriplegic and you're never going to walk again.' A motivational speaker came to the hospital and said something like 'Look at me, I'm in a wheelchair, I got back to work, life is great. I play badminton now!' And I was like, 'All right, screw these meetings and I'm never going back to them because life isn't great and don't look at me. I used to race motocross! F--- badminton.' And one day there was a flier on my bed about this thing called murderball and I saw a picture of Zupan. And I thought, Wow, this guy does not look like he plays badminton.''
Zupan and Cavill have since become close friends. ''Mark's very funny,'' says Cavill. ''When we go out to a premiere, he'll make sure my shirt is straight. He'll make sure that my pants are pressed. And if I'm ever like, 'Hey, Mark, you think I can get a water?,' without hesitating, he'll throw his own water at me.'' At Murderball's New York City premiere, Zupan presented Cavill with a brand-new quad rugby chair. Teams from all over the country have since invited Cavill to play with them.
''As a boy,'' says Shapiro, ''you grow up skateboarding and riding dirt bikes and your mom's always like, 'You're going to break your neck!' Before we started making this film, I thought life would be over if that ever happened. By the end, you realize it wouldn't be.''
Zupan stops at the airport to drop off Christopher Igoe, the friend who was driving the night of the accident years ago. ''That's my boy,'' he says, watching Igoe, a Florida stockbroker, in the mirror as he drives away. The two share a tender reunion in Murderball and credit the film with putting to rest old demons. ''He needed to finally forgive himself,'' says Zupan. ''He's my best friend and we talk daily.'' The two are thinking about starting an insurance company together. Their motto would be ''**** Happens.''
Back at the house, D.O.G. is asleep in shafts of late afternoon sun on the white living room carpet. Without warning, Zupan throws himself out of his chair and the two engage in a grunting, ecstatic wrestling match. Wampler sits cross-legged nearby, leafing through a copy of Boxers for Dummies. She starts laughing and tells the story about the time Zupan sent out a mass e-mail to all their friends, with the subject line ''My Future Wife.'' ''I'm thinking 'Ohhh, this is going to be so sweet,''' she says. ''And then it was just a bunch of pictures of Natalie Portman!'' Later, Zupan calls up some friends, an old college roommate and his wife who live down the street, and invites them over for a barbecue.
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Michelle
Jul 7th, 2005 - 7:07 PM |
Murderball article, Part III of III
Murderball article at ew.com
Part III
If he could have his legs back for an hour, on a Sunday afternoon just like this one, Zupan would spend it playing a couple rounds of golf with his dad and younger brother. ''That'd be pretty cool,'' he says, smiling at the idea. 'Yeah, I'd like that. But it's not going to happen.'' He gets some raised eyebrows when he tells folks that breaking his neck was the best thing that ever happened to him. He doesn't really care if you believe him or not. ''I've done more in the chair than a lot of people have who aren't in chairs. How many people do you know who have an Olympic medal? I've been to countries that I never would have f---ing been to, I've met so many people, done so many things.''
When he dreams at night, he sometimes forgets that he's a quadriplegic. ''It's kind of interesting. Like I'll be running, and the chair is alongside me. That's a fun one. Or I'll be walking up a flight of stairs and think — wait a second! I can't walk. So I go down the stairs, pick up my wheelchair, and take it back up with me to the top.''
(Posted:07/01/05)
Copyright © 2005 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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