murderball

I saw "Murderball" last night with the Geeze and his youngest. Happily, the theater wasn't empty, although it wasn't packed either.

It was great to see the athletes portrayed as people first - with personality quirks, goals and desires - and secondarily as quads. One of my favorite quotes is from one of Zupan's classmates at their 10 year reunion, "He was an asshole before the accident, so you can't attribute it to being in a wheelchair." For a great review check out Mark E. Smith's at wheelchairjunkie.

Today, talking with other women at a film seminar, I was happy to hear that the movie had successfully created a connection to the lives of the characters - a connection that they can now extend to other people in wheelchairs. One woman said that she will never look at a person in a wheelchair in the same way again; that she thought she had always had an open mind, but without realizing it had been carrying around a variety of misperceptions. If it weren't for the explicit language, I wonder about the effect of showing it in high schools and in "diversity training" seminars.

A few beefs:

• As we discussed at dinner afterwards, for a sports movie, it didn't say much about strategy, technique, or rules.
  
• I was surprised that one of the Team USA members said, "This isn't the Special Olympics" then made a derogatory remark about "retards." Which highlights the separation between the various disability communities and reinforces the notion that if there was some cause that all the communities could rally around, they would be quite a force for change.

As the Geeze said last night, "We're all disabled." Yes, we each have our own challenges, issues, roadblocks that we face daily. I tried to reinforce this idea with the two other filmmakers at today's seminar: one will be telling the story of a paraplegic skiier the other an autistic researcher. Hopefully, they'll tell the stories as people first.