For all that, "Murderball" has a lot of integrity, both in visual and conceptual terms, and seamlessly blends entertainment and education. Hearing the quadriplegic male athletes in this film talk openly and humorously about their sex lives -- yes, the machinery still works and, yes, the logistics can be pretty complicated -- is a strangely liberating experience, and Rubin and Shapiro get full marks for blowing the doors off that particular taboo. Beyond that, "Murderball" is a "Rocky"-esque sports saga with a rowdy, irascible cast of characters who demonstrate conclusively that being in a wheelchair does nothing to dampen the spirit of balls-out macho competition.

Quad rugby (formerly called "murderball") is a sport played on a standard wooden basketball court, in which teams of men in specially armored Road Warrior-style wheelchairs bash the bejesus out of each other while trying to carry the ball the length of the court, in the mode of football or rugby. They often knock each other sprawling; no helmets and minimal protective gear are worn. (As one player says: "What's going to happen? I'm going to break my neck?") As the film helpfully explains, a quadriplegic is not necessarily paralyzed in all four limbs, just impaired in all of them to some degree. Some players are pretty adept with their arms and carry the ball; others have limited use of arms or hands and serve as blockers or defensive players.

Rubin and Shapiro follow the U.S. team, led by a tattooed, goateed former soccer star named Mark Zupan, as it seeks revenge for a bitter loss to Canada, whose hardass coach is Joe Soares, a onetime American star now bearing a grudge of his own. The personal and athletic dramas surrounding the team are sufficiently absorbing that you relate to Soares, Zupan and the film's other characters principally as charismatic, driven and often pigheaded guys locked in ruthless competition. This is a hopelessly hackneyed thing to say, but you pretty much forget they're in wheelchairs. It's a triumph, as they say, of the human spirit, in its gnarliest and most dude-alicious form.

"Murderball" could have traveled one level deeper and asked more painful questions, though it might not have been such a crowd-pleaser. We briefly meet Keith Cavill, a recently injured motorcycle racer whom Zupan befriends, and watch him begin to adjust to the realities of a long and difficult rehabilitation and a transformed physical existence. While the rugby players have adjusted successfully -- and, if anything, adopted a hyper-masculine identity to compensate for their altered physical status -- Keith's psychic wounds are still naked. He looks around his spiffy new full-access apartment and pronounces, "This really sucks." All the guys in "Murderball" have presumably been through that emotion and come out the other side, but the film mainly shows us their destination, not their journey.

"Murderball" opens July 8 in New York and Los Angeles, with a national rollout to begin July 22.

"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus": Goin' noplace special, between Saturday night and Sunday morning
Drifting along the back roads of the South with no particular destination in mind, Andrew Douglas' "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" is a lovely, faintly sinister travelogue, accompanied by performances from such alt-country luminaries as Jim White, Johnny Dowd and the Handsome Family. White, in fact (whose album "The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus" lends the film its title), is our host for this journey, driving from Louisiana prison towns to North Florida juke joints to West Virginia holiness churches in a borrowed 1970 Chevelle.

Douglas is a British photographer and commercial director who made this film for the BBC, and its roots sometimes show. No Southerner -- and no non-Southerner who's ever ventured beyond Northern Virginia or the Atlanta suburbs -- will be surprised by any of the cultural observations on offer. You say fundamentalist Christianity is deeply rooted in the South? Its culture is divided between hellfire and salvation, between Saturday night at the cut-and-shoot bar and Sunday morning at the revival meeting? Well, I'll be damned! Is that why it's such a screwy place?

But hey, the musical interludes are terrific, and Douglas manages to shoot in all kinds of nowheresville barrooms, barbershops, churches and diners where you'd imagine that a passel of Limeys with cameras might provoke something of a reaction. His color palette is appropriately muted, and the film's curious mix of image and anecdote eventually gathers its own kind of momentum. If White isn't the most charismatic narrator I've ever seen, his odd tone of diffident, ambiguous respect for the enduring separateness of rural Southern existence seems like the right note to strike. And now that the South's demented morality has become, by default, the nation's, this couldn't be timelier.

"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" opens July 13 in New York; July 29 in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville and San Francisco; and Aug. 5 in Albuquerque, N.M., Buckhannon, W.Va., Orlando, San Luis Obispo, Calif., and Seattle, with other cities to follow.

Corrections: In my June 23 column, I incorrectly stated that "Elevator to the Gallows" would open that week in Boston. My apologies to Beantown readers; the correct opening date is July 22. A couple of columns earlier, I incorrectly stated that Werner Herzog's "The White Diamond" would soon be available on DVD. Herzog distributes his films himself through his Web site, and for reasons best known to himself makes most of them available only on VHS-PAL videotape, so you can't play them on a standard North American VCR. Go figure.

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