Darius Goes West

BigSugar — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:17:38 -0700

Alright, I'm gonna have to break serious here for second. Stick with me, it won't last long. I promise.

Here's
the deal; Darius Weems, a fifteen-year-old victim of Duchenne Muscular
Dystrophy and eleven compadres trek off from Athens, Georgia (GO DAWGS!) to L.A. in an attempt to get Pimp My Ride to customize the titular hero's dillapidated wheelchair. A hilllarious gut punch ensues.

Life
sucks, right? What do you got, you got a boss who's always on
your ass, a broad that wants all your cash or no broad at all, gas is
going through the roof while the commute gets longer, and blah, blah,
blah.

Darius Weems has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. That's
the bad kind. The kind you'd wish on Hitler. His brother
had it and died at twenty. If Darius is very, very lucky, he'll
get to see his thirtieth birthday. As of this day, DMD is a death
sentence. No exceptions. How bad does it suck to have this
disease? There are moments in this film where Darius is unable to
bring a cup to his mouth to drink or a cell to his ear to talk.
For people with this disease, a wheelchair is an improvement, that's
how bad.

But here's the point; Darius doesn't care.
All that hardship with things we take for granted, and he doesn't care
in the least. He doesn't care so much that not only did he and
eleven friends cross the contiguous forty-eight (back and forth), he
also laughs his ass off and has a grin that would make the
Cheshire Cat envious. This guy is centered to a point that most
of us will never get to. And best of all, he's funny as hell.

Two
scenes in this flick burned themselves into my brain. The first
is when Darius discovers "Glosabi." The second is a very short
conversation with his mother near then end of the trip that has to be
seen to be believed. Those two scenes alone are worth whatever you
have to go through to get this flick. As an added bonus, Smalley
and no less than three editors tightened this thing down to clockwork
and made a flick that, while standing on a soapbox for sure, manages to
both entertain and educate without ever once talking
down. Among the docs I've seen, this is absolutely the
finest. And if that isn't enough to tempt you, Darius raps
throughout the film, and while he'll never be mistaken for Dr. Dre, he
manages to rhyme the word "dystrophy." Not even Snoop can make
that work, I promise.

Every once in a while, a movie cames
along that slaps you around and reminds you to keep moving, keep
fighting. This is one of those movies. Darius got the fuzzy
end of the lollipop, no doubt, but it didn't slow him down one
bit. Every now and then, we all need to be reminded that as hard
as life can get, some people have it a lot harder, and yet they still
fight on. And they do it with smile and a laugh. We should
all be so lucky.

www.dariusgoeswest.com

Get it and love it.

Save Yourselves,

'Nuff Sugar

Logan Smalley

Darius Goes West