The Rodeo

Have I ever mentioned that I hate going to the video store? There is nothing good to hire; you can either have sex or extreme violence, and even the violence generally comes with a pointless nude scene or two.

I went to the video store twice on Friday night. Didn’t get anything the first time, so Jen convinced me to go back and get something… fine.

I came back with Murderball and Primer.

Murderball is the original name of Quad Rugby - a wheelchair ‘football’ game. Obviously being quadraplegics there is no foot play to be seen, but rather a bunch of grown men stuffing themselves into armoured wheelchairs and then ramming the crap (technical term) out of whoever has the ball.

The movie/documentary focused on on the USA team, who were virtually undefeated until we saw them lose to Canada early on in the movie. There was also the Canadian head coach, who was the US’ best player for years, and then got cut from the team, so went to Canada to get them to win gold at the paralympics.

It was a pretty interesting doco - lots of swearing (but that’s pretty hard to avoid these days) and a completely unpredictable chapter on quadraplegic sex. With movies. That was kind of wierd to watch with a wife who was already annoyed that I didn’t get Serenity instead. FYI - I skipped to the next chapter. There was one guy who they filmed who had been disabled only a few months previously and he was really down, and then they stuck him in one of these chair/chariots and you could just see the guy light up like nothing. That was pretty moving.

Primer was wierd. Really slow to start, but you could see that it was heading somewhere interesting, so I didn’t mind. It’s a low budget movie about time travel, it’s pretty different to most mainstream movies, and has a feel very much like Cube, Hypercube and Donnie Darko. That is, it doesn’t treat the audience like idiots, leaves out a lot of detail, and makes for a large amount of conversation afterwards.

Also the plot gets a bit hard to follow, but it was interesting nonetheless. Jen decided after we finished watching it that she didn’t like it, I figured that I did, but it was a very considered opinion in both cases - we didn’t decide till about an hour after it finished (it was only an hour and a quarter, so it’s not a huge chunk of life gone in either case).

I went searching on the net after the movie finished to try and get a few things clarified, and discovered that at the movie’s official site is still running strong with people trying to decipher what the go with the story is. I also discovered that it was the director’s first movie (which explains a few things), and that it only cost $7000. Which means he should be rich just from me hiring it.

Two very different movies, I’d probably recommend Primer, but I’m still not sure about Murderball, with it’s crazy-sex stuff.

RodeoClown: thinks time travel is a great idea for stories.

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