Flutterby™! : Sports movies

On Friday, Forest and I went out to see Murderball (mentioned previously). I'm still trying to sort out why I'm not jumping up and down to say "you must see this movie". It's a good movie and, indeed, it has me looking at disability in new ways. It was not a "we can do everything able bodied people can do" movie, one of the great lines was when Mark Zupan is talking at a rehab hospital, one of the patients asks "What happens if we can walk again? Can we still play?" Zupan replies, deadpan, something like "If something happens and you can get up out of the chair and walk normally again, this might be one of the things you'll have to give up."

So it's a movie about some people who have come to terms with their limitations and are excelling within those limits. And it's a movie about what those limits mean, and they're not always what I expected: the bits on sex and disability were both funny and enlightening.

On the other end of things, the "these people are gifted and have pushed their bodies to the extreme end of that", a few weeks ago, John sent me a copy of The Tour Baby!: Armed with a video camera and no prior knowledge of how to use it, Scott Cody buys a plane ticket to France, rents a van, and goes to Le Tour de France. Scott's obviously a personable guy, he ends up going from being just another guy with a video camera to getting access to... well... standing on the winner's podium. Along the way he talks to the women who present the medals, the guys who drive the camera motorcycles, hands the camera off to one of the crew who takes it in to the hotel the cyclists are staying at.

This isn't a "what is The Tour?" tape, it's one die-hard cycling fan's fairly well-edited home movie of what he saw when he went to see it. It's probably not the right place to start if you're of the "I've been biking a bit, and heard of this Tour thing..." ilk, but even so we enjoyed it.