DVD Review: Murderball

Murderball is an older documentary, I almost labeled this with "classics" but then decided it wasn't quite that old. It came out in 2005, and I have been meaning to watch it every since it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards. One thing about watching older documentaries is that there is no better way to really understand how far and how fast the technology has changed. Murderball is only seven years old, but it has that very distinctive video feel of the time. Since I've been making a documentary, I know what micro-budget docs are filming with these days and how they look, and we've definitely moved on to a slicker look.

But at the end of the day, that grainy look is part of what helps Murderball work. It's definitely a film that holds up years later because the topic is more or less timeless. It's an easy film to sum up: it's a film about the stars of wheelchair rugby and the rivalry between the US and Canadian teams.

It has all the hallmarks of a good sports film, fiction or non. The rivalry has a long history, there's a coach with a history of playing on the U.S. team who left to coach Canada after he didn't make it on the team one year. You've got the expected personalities, and even a "new kid" who is interested in the sport and wants to play. There are even groupies.

From the look of things, the filmmakers were probably filming for a little over a year on the project. So many things happen over that span, and that helps it to follow more narrative ideas as the "characters" grow and change. They reconcile with people from their past, one faces a health crisis, another deals with recovering from the accident that paralyzed him and learns about the sport for the first time.

The trick that makes this all work is that they must have had an amazing editor. The film could have been very scattered, or even very boring. But they don't spend a lot of time on the things that bog down a typical sports documentary and instead focus on the actual people, which is the part everybody cares about anyway. You get the gist of the rules, you learn a bit about the chairs themselves. But anything that you could easily learn with an internet search is left to the wayside unless it's needed to understand the people.

Overall, it was an excellent film and I think any sports fans would enjoy it. Those who like documentary will like it as well, and I think the pace and storytelling skills are good enough that even those who don't like documentaries as much should give it a try.

Just sleep more, it's easy!

So, for the last three or four days, I've had this really annoying twitch in my right eye. It comes and goes, nothing too bad, just annoying.

I was trying to figure out if there was something I could do about it. Can a warm or cold compress help, would any kind of OTC medication do any good, that kind of thing. Because I can tell it isn't anything problematic, and I'm almost certain it's just from looking at the computer too much because I've been working a lot.

I know that looking up medical advice online is a dangerous thing anyway. But you can usually separate a lot of the junk from the real knowledge relatively easily.

In this case, there were basically only two pieces of advice on every single site I checked: reduce stress and sleep more.

I had another medical issue earlier in the month, and the three different doctors during the course of the day told me I should try to reduce my stress (they didn't mention sleep, I don't think they heard me when I said I'd only slept a couple hours, there were other things on their minds).

It's made me start thinking about it, and how often in my life I've had doctors just tell me to be less stressed out and to sleep more. How often we're told that, repeatedly.

Sure, it's sound advice. We probably all need less stress and more sleep.

But it's nonsensical in a lot of ways, because at the end of the day stress and sleep schedules are widely outside of our control. There are some things we can do, but it only is so much.

Stress often comes from jobs or money, things that we can't just cut out or change or fix easily. At the moment a lot of mine comes from health care and health insurance. But all of the issues with that are pretty much out of my control. Literally an Act of Congress can't manage to take care of most of it.

In the past few months, a significant number of my friends have had problems with their living situations and had to move on short notice. Who knows how many people are currently fighting to deal with their underwater mortgages and foreclosures.

All of this unavoidable stress that so many people are under is of course causing them to have insomnia. Or they're working long hours at multiple jobs so that they can pay for things and don't have time to sleep. Not to mention that Americans all have this cult of exhaustion going on. Have you ever heard two people at a job trying to one up each other with how little sleep they've gotten or how many coffees they've had to drink to be awake. Heck, even the show I'm watching just had a joke about how "we can sleep when we're dead."

Not to mention, how many of us have had bosses that expect long hours and even extra work once you come home? We live in a society that wants us to sacrifice everything, including sleep, to get ahead. And if you don't want to make that sacrifice then you're not just punished, you're shamed and insulted. I once had a job where I had to argue with them repeatedly that it didn't matter if they offered me extra hours or overtime pay, I had other things I was doing (I was a grad student at the time, and I'm married) and that no amount of money was worth my little spare time.

If we're supposed to reduce our stress and sleep better to help our health, then maybe we need to start looking at larger problems in our society and how they're affecting us in both large and small ways.

Castle: Season One

I had put off watching Castle for a long time, for a lot of reasons. I worried that it was only popular because of Nathan Fillion, because sometimes super fans don't always have the best record and are very forgiving of things if their favorite actor is involved (I'm guilty of this too). Also, because I watch way too many murder mysteries. It's one of my favorite genres, but I've felt a little burnt out on them. I started watching a different police procedural type show recently, and I only got a few episodes in before I just gave up because it felt like more of the same. There was nothing to draw me in, I was just bored with how predictable they've all gotten. And none of the characters really interested me either. I was really afraid that was going to happen with Castle too.

It only took ten minutes of the first episode to change my mind. All I needed was to meet the main characters and I was sold and ready to give this more time.

The thing about mysteries, both novels and shows, is that they are a well worn genre. There are certain character archetypes, relationships, red herrings. The problem is, that for mystery fans, you can't leave these things out. It's a danger with any kind of genre work, you have to be part of the genre but you don't want to be the exact same as everything that came before.

The problem is, that a lot of shows try to circumvent this by doing the whole "but that's in books/on tv/in movies, this is real life!" argument. Don't get me wrong, Castle goes into this too, but they do it in a way that I love. Instead of the skeptical character going "this is real life!" you have Castle spinning his crazy stories and Beckett saying that this is police work, not a novel, and they need evidence. And on top of that: Castle's theories are usually wrong.

The show is just so creative. They're able to give the characters so much backstory, without it feeling forced or inconsistent. Even if the writers don't have the entire long story mapped out, they're very good at staying on track with their characters. Normally the first season of a show is where the characters are figuring out who they are, and the actors are trying to find themselves in the role. But Castle didn't feel that way.

Every single actor on the show is pulling their weight, and they're all amazing. Every character that could be a cardboard stereotype, especially Castle's family, isn't. There isn't a single recurring character that isn't layered, interesting, and awesome in some way.

Even the "Moonlighting" style relationship between Castle and Beckett doesn't feel tiresome and played out, but like two people genuinely getting to know each other and having a relationship build from begrudging co-workers to friends to possibly more.

I haven't really gotten into the specifics of season one, I know. But that's because the specific episodes almost aren't even the point of the show. Yes, the murders are all a little weird but the resolution of them is actually my kind of mystery. They keep me guessing, and with one notable exception, I almost always am following the same dead end trail as the detectives until they prove it wrong. It's the first time in a very long time that I've been excited to not know what's happening, and to have no desire to look up spoilers and know things ahead of time.

Also, unlike some shows on television (some of which Castle calls out without naming and those jokes are hilarious) they actually follow police procedure that seems realistic. Plus, so far I haven't seen them break any laws or violate anybody's civil rights to get the bad guy like some other shows I could name. Beckett actually delegates responsibilities to other departments and members of her team in a realistic way, rather than having some lab tech question suspects or a showing a beat cop running forensic tests or something.

The first season of Castle is only ten episodes, and I can see how it might have been a hard sell to the network in the first place so they only ordered a short season. But it finds it's groove so quickly that I'm still terrified it can't stay this good for that long. But then the season finale ends not on a physical cliffhanger (somebody held at gunpoint, somebody kidnapped, whatever) but on a very strong emotional one. You have to watch the next episode, not to find out what happens (though that's part of it) but to find out how they FEEL about what happened.

And that, my friends, is the mark of good television.