The cinetrix only slipped in for the final two-thirds of Murderball, mostly because she's confident there'll be another chance to see it. It's a certified crowd-pleaser. C'mon, who wouldn't delight in a film about the foul-mouthed paraplegics who play wheelchair rugby at the Paralympic level?
Already an audience fave at Sundance and SXSW, it split the Full Frame Grand Jury Prize and next rolls in to Boston for the Independent Film Festival and then on to San Francisco. Based on the end credits, a Murderball soundtrack could clean up with fans of Ministry, but the filmmakers deserve special props for harnessing the faux-naif uplift of the Polyphonic Spree's "Light and Day" and making it feel genuine.
Another doc I only saw the latter half of was the grim Gray Matter, directed by Joe Berlinger, who last did Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. According to the filmmaker, this was the first time since Paradise Lost that he read a story in the newspaper and then embarked on filming without financing already in place.
What a story. In 2002, more than 700 preserved brains of children who had been euthanized in a Nazi clinic were finally buried. The lead researcher at Spiegelgrund Hospital, Dr. Heinrich Gross, has never been prosecuted for these killings. Berlinger went to Vienna to try to interview Gross and find out what happened.
Gray Matter debuted on Cinemax last night, and Virginia Heffernan had this to say in her NYT review:
There's so much terror and grief in this documentary that viewers will be left numb. What to do with that numbness? Is numbness a step toward enlightenment?
The cinetrix can't answer that question, but she imagines some of the congenitally paraplegic subjects of Murderball might relish getting Dr. Gross in the middle of a scrum.
