Wednesday, July 11, 2018

There's More Than This Existential Life with Kills on Wheels.


Afternoon, Guys…


So, I haven’t been this psyched about a movie in A LONG TIME!  The film’s Kills on Wheels (Tiszta szívvel), an action dramedy Hungarian film from ’16!  The thing is it stars a born and made crips!  AN ACTION FILM!  The last time, I saw a movie that had a real crip was ‘13’s Labor Day with Micah Fowler, who has CP and has made a name for himself in ABC’s Speechless as J.J. DiMeo, but he only had, like, one line.

Let me set the stage.  I was on Putlocker looking for something to watch after we watched Book Club that Joey was interested to see, which I’ll tell you guys about later.  Anyway, I was scrolling and scrolling until my eye was caught by an image.  I read the synopsis and and checked out the trailer…OH SHIT, THESE DUDES ARE FOR REAL!  I tried to pull it up on Putlocker, but it was lagging too bad, so I tried Amazon…DAMN, not Prime, so I tried Netflix…GOT IT!  After we watched First Class so Joey could get her James McAvoy fix, I put on the film.

Like I said, Kills on Wheels is a foreign film and there’s no English dub, so expect to read subtitles.

I read most of them, but I let the acting tell me the movie, which tells the story of two crips, Zolika played by Zoltán Fenyvesi, who has severe scoliosis to the point of needing a life-saving surgery, and Barba Papa played by Ádám Fekete, who has CP, living an existential life in a “home.”  They want more and get in WAY MORE than they bargained for when they meet Rupaszov played by Szabolcs Thuroczy, who in the story was a firefighter before he was caught in a fire to become a crip.  Now, he’s an ex-con returning to the life of a hitman to do one more job before he’s set for life and he can get out.

Like most films of its ilk, Kills on Wheels’ color palette’s a mix of greys and blues like every scene’s overcast.  You have your heavies, which happen to be able-bodies, that’re trying to kill, this case the lesser of the two evils.  That’s about where the similarities between Kills and your standard fare end.

Being that the main characters’re crips, we get to see real-world crip life as far as transferring, a foley getting emptied in a gutter, which ain’t exactly normal, but I’ve let my catheter drain into a gutter when I didn’t have a urinal in my younger days.  Some of the convos were convos I’ve had with crip friends about being a crip and life, so that was cool.  I said it’s an action movie, but they are crips, so the action’s a little slower, but still badass, IMO.

A few sequences to watch out for: We get introduced to Rupaszov when he’s doing pull-ups …CHAIR AND ALL, Rupaszov using his Roho cushion as a weapon concealer and a kind of a silencer, and there’s a sequence where three’re fishing that had me rolling out loud to where I had to work to not wake Joey up.

If other countries are starting to crank out inclusive fare like this America needs to get their shit together, or they’re to miss the parade.  Kills was the Hungarian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards.  Even though it was not nominated, it was brought out of the shadows.

Check it out and be good to each other.

-J-

No comments:

Post a Comment