In the New York Times, Charles McGrath talks with Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro about their new doc, "Murderball," playing this weekend at New Directors/New Films:
"We're not sports guys, and we didn't want to make a sports film," Mr. Rubin says now. "We wanted to make a movie about guys who had broken their necks." "Murderball" does indeed trace the rehabilitations of several players from severe cervical injuries, many of them sustained in freak accidents involving alcohol, but it's a sports movie all the same. It not only touches on just about every theme on the sports flick checklist - teamwork, adversity, joy of victory, agony of defeat, etc. - but also repeatedly makes the point that being wheelchair bound does not necessarily liberate one from the basic jock mind-set.
