Posted by Mr. Beaks ; If you're looking for a respite from the numbing event film onslaught that is the Summer Movie Season, the breather you're looking for is called Murderball, an excellent documentary about Quadriplegic Rugby(http://www.quadrugby.com/toc.htm) that distinguishes itself both for the unsentimental approach of its filmmakers, Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, and the invigorating technique they use to tell their multilayered tale.; Fraught with all the ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies of most classic sports films,;Murderball is a bruising, emotional thrill ride that depicts Team USA’s struggle to rebound from a devastating loss in the 2002 World Championships at the hands of Team Canada.; This defeat is painful not only because it ended a decade’s worth of dominance by Team USA, but also because Team Canada is coached by Joe Soares, a former American standout who hightailed it to the Great White North in order to exact revenge on his native squad for cutting him several years ago. ; Leading the charge for Team USA is Mark Zupan, a boundlessly charismatic badass whose personality dominates, but never overwhelms the film.; That said, watching Zupan in this movie, you get the feeling you’re witnessing the birth of a movie star, something the film’s co-distributor MTV obviously picked up on, which is why, when;Jackass returns in the near future, you’ll be seeing Zupan clowning around with Johnny Knoxville and Steve O for what sounds like a particularly painful episode (I can’t wait to see what this “Wheelchair Cattle Prod Jousting” is all about). ; So, when I was offered a one-on-three interview with Rubin, Shapiro and Zupan a couple of weeks ago, I leapt at the opportunity, and, unsurprisingly, was rewarded with a gloriously uncensored discussion during which the able-bodied Rubin kept doing laps around our table in what looked like an unmodified wheelchair.; (The wheelchairs used by the Quad Rugby players are pissed off looking conveyances that’d be right at home in a George Miller smash-‘em-up.); While not the most fluid interview I’ve ever conducted, it certainly was entertaining, as we touched on myriad subjects including the structuring of the narrative, the integration into the narrative of the film’s third character, a newly injured young man named Keith Cavill, and Zupan’s… softening toward Soares.