soccer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When you think of Sundance wheeling and dealing, you probably think of the bigger players on the indie circuit: the studio specialty divisions, the veteran boutique distributors, or the fledging mid-level newcomers driven by recent investments. But a cable sports channel? ESPN jumped into the game on Saturday by acquiring soccer doc Kicking It, according to indieWIRE.

ESPN is not getting into the theatrical distribution business, though. Instead, they will help the filmmakers to secure theatrical, DVD and other distribution while retaining, naturally enough, worldwide television rights.

Directed by Susan Koch, Kicking It focuses less on the sport and more on a group that uses soccer to help homeless people. First established in 2001, the competition for the Homeless World Cup now involves upwards of 20,000 homeless people playing street soccer. That number is winnowed down through competition to 500 players representing 48 countries. The doc profiles seven players from all over the world: Ireland, Kenya, Spain, USA, Afghanistan and Russia. I imagine we'll hear words like "inspirational' in descriptions of the film; how could it not be?

Koch is a veteran filmmaker and has directed documentaries throughout the world. (Full disclosure: One of the film's producers is Ted Leonsis, AOL executive. He also served as executive producer for Nanking, a doc that premiered at Sundance last year.) ESPN feels that Kicking It fits within their goals of reaching out to an international audience, according to the indieWIRE article. We'll keep an eye out for any forthcoming distribution deals for the film.

I didn't expect the next film from An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim to be a fictitious tale about a teenage girl, but stranger things have happened. Gracie is a fairly standard sports movie, but with an attention-grabbing twist: a girl trying to land a spot on an all-boys high-school soccer team in the 1970s. It's a compelling film at times, as well as wholesome entertainment for families, but never breaks free from the trademark cliches of the inspirational sports-film genre that Disney and other studios have been churning out regularly for the past few years.

Gracie (Carly Schroeder) has three brothers, all of whom spend a lot of time being drilled in soccer techniques by their competition-obsessed father (Dermot Mulroney). He dismisses his 15-year-old daughter, though, and won't even acknowledge her when she asks to play with them. After Gracie's older brother dies in a car accident, she decides to honor his memory by joining his soccer team and beating the local rival, something her brother was never quite able to achieve. Her family won't take her seriously, her would-be boyfriend (Christopher Shand) laughs at her, the school won't let her train in the only gym with free weights, and at first she can't find a single person to support her dream. But you know what happens to protagonists in sports movies who have a dream -- you can't keep them down forever.

Two buses roll down the streets of Tehran, bound for Azadi Stadium. Packs of wild soccer fans hang out the windows like colorful streamers, shouting victory chants at the occupants of other, similar buses. On one bus, a concerned man searches for his daughter. On another bus, a lone figure sits quietly at the front. She is clearly a girl, with a soft face and a cute, turned-up nose. But she has done her best to disguise her gender, wearing a cap with flaps down the back, baggy clothes, and face painted in Iran's colors. Several of the boys on the bus immediately see through her disguise.

The girl (Sima Mobarak-Shahi) is on her way to see the big Iran vs. Bahrain game, a real-life qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup. The boys warn her that she'll never make it into the stadium, but she persists. She pays exorbitant fees for tickets, and is almost immediately nabbed by a security guard. Thus begins Jafar Panahi's Offside, a movie outraged by the ridiculous rules that keep women from attending live soccer matches in Iran. It has been pleasing audiences all over the world -- except in its native Iran where it has been banned.

When I was a very gullible first-grader, somebody told me the name Pelé was short for "Peg Leg". I was then convinced for a very short, very stupid afternoon that the soccer legend actually played the sport with a wooden leg. After I was set straight on the truth, I felt like an idiot, but the worst of it is that I was never able to fully appreciate Pelé's real talents. I couldn't get over the fact that he'd be more impressive to me if he had that handicap. I haven't thought much about him since elementary school, after which I gave up on soccer, but now I'm looking forward to finally learning about Pelé as I wish I had in the beginning -- with a biopic.

The three-time World Cup winner has just signed with the William Morris Agency, which will be packaging a movie in his honor. Even with both legs, Pelé's story should be perfect for a film with plenty of crowd-pleasing dramatic arcs. He grew up in poverty in Brazil and was taught to play by his father, a former pro footballer. At 15, he went pro, at 16, he joined the Brazil national team, and at 17, he was the youngest person to play in a World Cup final, and subsequently the youngest to win. About a decade later he scored his 1000th goal and then won his third Cup. After retiring from playing the sport in Brazil, he functioned as a star player (past his prime) for the New York Cosmos and also co-starred with Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone in John Huston's Victory. I'm not sure who will be best to star as Pelé, but since the actor will have to be repped by WMA, the list is certainly narrowed down. Unfortunately I have no access to the agency's list of talent. And I don't suppose City of God's Alexandre Rodrigues is on it.

One of the fascinating aspects of attending aGLIFF was the "I" in the festival name: International. The festival showed a number of foreign-language films this year, which provided Austin (and American) audiences with the opportunity to see how gay and gender issues are addressed in other countries. Eleven Men Out provides a glimpse into gay culture and its acceptance (or rejection) in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Eleven Men Out begins and ends in a sports arena. Ottar Thor (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) is a professional soccer star who decides, after scoring an amazing kick to win a championship game, to come out of the closet. He's essentially kicked off the team, and his father, one of the managers, keeps trying to convince Ottar to change his mind. Ottar's teenage son Magnus (Arnaldur Ernst) is disgusted and convinced that Ottar doesn't care about him and the effect his coming-out has on his own life. Ottar's ex-wife Gugga (Lilja Nótt Þórarinsdóttir), an alcoholic former Miss Iceland, is only concerned because Ottar won't sleep with her anymore. Ottar's friend Pétur gets him involved with an amateur soccer team with a few gay men on it, which suddenly becomes labeled "the gay team," causing all kinds of trouble. Other teams in the league forfeit games rather than have to play with gay men, but the team itself becomes stronger and more confident as more gay teammates join.

Editor's note: The review was originally published on April 14, shortly before the film's Tribeca screenings.

Hundreds of soccer documentaries have been made, but for Americans who love the sport, they generally lead only to further frustration. The domestic efforts to address the sport we love tend to be either defensive (insisting over and over again that soccer is as worthy of adoration as baseball or football) or academic (trying to reason strangers to the game, hoping that, through education, they will come to understand and appreciate it). The European and Latin ones, though more enjoyable, ultimately serve only to reminds us of what we can never have. For the American soccer fan, then, Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos is like a bolt of lightning on a sunny day: an explosion of sudden, blinding power that comes utterly out of nowhere, so unexpected that it leaves you breathless. It's a wide-eyed, delirious celebration of American soccer, the likes of which we've never seen. And it's indescribably wonderful, the kind of film that brings a smile to your face the moment it begins and doesn't let go. Directors Paul Crowder and John Dower clearly love soccer, and they revel in the insanity that was the New York Cosmos, the team that dominated the North American Soccer League (NASL) during its glory days of the late 1970's. Their passion and energy is in every frame of the film, and in combination with sharp editing (Crowder is an editor by trade), an irresistible soundtrack, and a clever, 70's inspired sensibility that touches everything from the movie's fonts to its music, they serve to make the film and its story irresistible.

We'll never know if Shakespeare would have appreciated She's the Man, an update of his play Twelfth Night: Or What You Will reset in teen sports comedy land. It is a good bet, at least, he's not rolling in his grave about it, at least no more than Ovid and Chaucer, among others, were rolling in theirs during the Elizabethan era, when the Bard put the poet in poetic license with his own reworking of classics like Pyramus and Thisbe (as Romeo and Juliet) and The Knight's Tale (as The Two Noble Kinsmen). Twelfth Night was itself somewhat a variation of his own The Comedy of Errors, an early title based rather faithfully on Plautus' Menaechmi.

The works of William Shakespeare remain one of the rare arguments in favor of remakes these days, as repeat after rehash after revival is met with great public disdain. There was little plot development he didn't lift from some prior story, but his genius was in how he told, not what he told, and it is the language of his writing that has carried distinction over time. It is therefore ironic that modern versions of his plays, in turn, inherit a sort of credibility by making a legacy out of the action.

George Weah is a legend in both his native Liberia and in the world of football soccer. Having played at the highest level all over the world for more than a decade - in 1995 while at AC Milan, he was named World Footballer of the Year, African Footballer of the Year, and FIFA Footballer of the Year - he retired in the wake of Liberia's failure to qualify for the 2002 World Cup. Always interested in humanitarian issues in his war-torn homeland, in 2004 Weah finally threw his hat into the political ring, announcing his intentions to run for president in the 2005 elections. The field of candidates was outrageously crowded and, though Weah was the early front-runner and won the first round of voting, he eventually lost in a runoff.

Despite his political failure, Weah's story remains an inspiration to many, and Tollin/Robbins Productions and Animus Films plan to make a film about his life, with a focus on his "political awakening." The screenplay is being written by Sid Quashie, who describes Weah - a consultant on the project - as a man who "presented possibilities to a generation of teens who were unemployed and former child soldiers during the civil war. He's like Pele, Michael Jordan and (Nelson) Mandela rolled into one."