Doglegs (2015)

August 18, 2023 10:37 AM

Doglegs is a cheerfully iconoclastic underground scene where the disabled battle the able-bodied - all in the name of exploding stereotypes. When the disabled champ seeks life and love beyond the ring, his idol, the able-bodied organizer, tries to sabotage his bid for independence. In a battle of the human spirit, can the power of disability win our hero his dreamgirl?

A documentary by heath Cozens.

Widely available streaming. JustWatch.

Soliloquy was kind enough to support MeFi with a donation. Their second request was for six movies about Japanese films centered on people with disabilities. I'll be using the tag #DisabilityInJapan

Donate $25 or more to MeFi and you can MeMail me a request for a themed day of your own. I'll fill up the sidebar on FF with six movies that fit your theme.

posted by DirtyOldTown (2 comments total)

This one is a cheat, as it's not a film made in Japan, though it is a film about Japan.

Honestly, I was going to close out with 37 Seconds which is excellent, but I'm about a year and half too late on that one.

Japanese cinema has a weird relationship with disability, that I am not the best candidate to break down. (This online discussion/seminar is pretty good though.)

From what I saw doing research for this, Japanese cinema has a lot of each of these:
-ableist inspiration porn
-tragic romances about the blind or hearing impaired
-blind swordsman action flicks (There are at least 26 Zatoichi movies alone)

But I wanted to show a broader swath of disability in Japan. Doglegs is good for that, even if it's not actually a Japanese made film.

As bonus selections:
-Late Bloomer - Masakiyo Sumida (himself living with a physical disability) plays a man with a disability who becomes a serial killer. It's not readily available streaming so I can't post it and haven't seen it, but the discourse on this is fascinating as many people rate the portrayal of a person with a disability here as searing and accurate, even if he ends up becoming a killer.
-The Face of Another - Seems to be a sort of Eyes Without a Face thing about a man with physical facial differences feeling tortured and making some risky choices, but a) I haven't seen it and do not know if it ends up taking his differences seriously or merely as fodder for horror and b) I didn't want to overload the list with horror
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:51 AM on August 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is so weird. I was just thinking about movies with disability and fighting-more in the vein of action movies-while I was working out. Get out of my head, DOT!!!
posted by miss-lapin at 12:10 PM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]