The World Needs More Ninjas

Murderball: Awesome documentary about wheelchair rugby (the title is the slang name for the sport). The basic idea is these paraplegics get these like $3000 wheelchairs that basically act like battering rams. Then, on a basketball court, the goal is essentially to get the ball from one end of the court to the other while the other team basically plays kill the man with the ball (a running joke is, “What’s the worst that could happen to us…are we going to break our necks again?”). Evidently, Canada and the US have quite the bitter rivalry in the sport and the film follows the teams between two world championships in the sport. So, the storyline is very interesting…never a dull moment. Aside from the game, I learned a lot about paraplegics in general, how the operate, what they can and cannot do. There was one guy who had no arms and no legs, but could drive a car with some special braces!

Red Eye: Kind of like a good old Hitchcock movie with a character trapped in a thriller and you cringing throughout hoping that she gets away. Yea, I know it’s a plot that’s been done to death, but this movie just happens to do it very well. A hotel manager finds herself stuck on a plane caught up in an assassination attempt with her father as collateral. The movie is relatively realistic…definitely not so unbelievable that it becomes unenjoyable. It keeps you thinking throughout, “Now, if I were in this situation, what would I do to get out of it?”. The bad guy is Cillian Murphy, who played the Scarecrow in Batman Begins. He just great in these roles as the creepy guy who seems nice enough on the surface but is, at any given time, about 10 seconds away from getting medieval on your hiney. Murphy’s bound to be the Gary Oldman of the next generation.

Grizzly Man: Just your typical documentary about, stop me when you’ve heard this one, man gets messed up in drugs and alcohol, man has spiritual awakening while visiting grizzlies in Alaska and quits his addictions cold turkey, man spends every summer living with the grizzlies and treating them like big pets, man gets progressively kooky, man ends up getting torn to shreds by the grizzlies (not really a spoiler because you learn all of this in the first ten minutes of the movie if you haven’t already seen the story on the Discovery Channel). It’s just such a wild story that you can’t help but watch in awe for the entire duration of the movie. It’s not too gross…just a few descriptions of the attack by the coroner…no visuals. The R-rating comes mainly from this F-bomb tirade that Timothy Treadwell goes into at one point about the park service during a monologue. Treadwell would make movies while he was with the grizzlies, so there’s lots of beautiful cinematography from the Alaskan mountains.

In the end, you don’t really feel a lot of sympathy for Treadwell because you get the sense it’s kind of the way he would have wanted to go and that he had to realize his entire life was on a collision course to such an event. Unfortunately, his girlfriend was killed in the attack as well. Apparently, in 2003, they were leaving for the summer, but Treadwell got in a debate at the airport with a clerk and decided that he was fed up with the human world and headed back to the grizzlies. However, being late in the season, most of the grizzlies with which he was familiar had left for hibernation and the more wild bears from the interior had moved to his usual spot. You can kind of fill in the blanks from there. During the attack, his camera was on, but the lens cap was on. So, one of the more emotional parts of the movie just shows the director’s reaction as he listens to this audio tape (owned by some of Treadwell’s friends and never released to the public). Some of the more amazing footage that Treadwell captured before dying includes two bears fighting over a girl bear. You realize that these bears are truly modern day monsters as they go at each other. If you see one movie from this list, make it this one as a I guarantee that you will sit there spellbound for an hour and half and be telling people about it for the next week.

And, I got to throw in one movie that you probably haven’t seen and you should just avoid. That would be Broken Flowers. Let me start by saying that I actually enjoyed Lost in Translation (“Lip my stockings! Lip my stockings!”). This movie exceeds even that in slow scenes and ambiguous endings to the point that it just becomes unenjoyable. The movie could have been cut down to about 20 minutes if they took out all the scenes of Bill Murray just driving his car through the country or awkwardly sitting in silence. And, the movie has what has to be one of the most gratuitous nudity scenes in quite sometime with virtually no rhyme or reason. And, I’ll just go ahead an say it (spoiler warning): after spending the whole movie searching for clues about his son, Bill Murray comes up completely empty, just standing in the middle of the road as the camera pans around his face. Whoopty-do. Can I have those two hours of my life back? The bad thing is, if you’re not forewarned, the movie is just interesting enough to keep you watching until the very end before you realize the entire film was a waste of your time.

If anyone else has seen any of these movies, leave a comment and let me know what you thought of them.