Kick flicks

Fri., June 23, 2006

John Petkovic Newhouse News Service

Get your kicks with these flicks – soccer movies that formed and transformed the genre:

•"Victory": John Huston's 1981 yarn about POWs going toe-to-toe with Nazis is one of the few soccer movies to come out of Hollywood. During filming, Sylvester Stallone fired his trainer, British goalie Gordon Banks. Stallone thought goalkeeping was easy – until he dislocated a shoulder and broke two ribs trying to do it.

•"Shaolin Soccer": Stephen Chow's hilarious 2001 comedy tells the story of a ragtag team assembled by a once-great player that incorporates kung fu into the game. The game scenes are so totally ridiculous that they make "Rocky IV" seem believable. Of course, "Shaolin Soccer" is trying to be funny.

•"Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick": Wim Wenders' 1971 film tells the story of a goalkeeper who gets kicked out of a game for committing a foul, only to wind up on the run for committing a crime. It also focuses on the game and the position of the isolated goalie as a microcosm of modern-day chaos.

•"Bend It Like Beckham": You don't have to like soccer to love Gurinder Chadha's 2002 film about a Sikh girl who breaks through cultural barriers. It's feel-good, but also transcendent – a story that uses a game to explore the rules and barriers that exist outside the stadium.

•"The Mean Machine": Soccer player-turned-actor Vinnie Jones ("Snatch") stars in this 2001 flick (a British remake of "The Longest Yard") about a player who gets busted throwing games and clobbering cops. The criminals are as crazy as they are ridiculous, and the violence is as boneheaded as it is absurd.

•"The Cup": Even Buddhist monks love soccer in this enchanting 1999 film – the first made in Bhutani – about World Cup fans in a Tibetan monastery.

•"One Day in Europe": This 2005 German/Spanish movie uses soccer to show that Europe is still a clannish continent inhabited by many rival teams, er, nations.

The thrill of victory in sports flicks always comes in slow motion, with larger-than-life drama, cheering fans and triumphant heroes.

The home run in the bottom of the ninth on a field of dreams. The quarterback who dives into the end zone as time expires, and the stadium erupts. The knockout punch delivered by that nobody whose dream of being a contender comes to life.

Then there’s soccer.

Poor, poor soccer. You know, the sport that the entire planet – outside the United States, anyway – obsesses over, especially with this thing called the World Cup going on.

The game which most Americans think is played entirely in slow motion has largely been shut out at the movie theater.

Part of the reason lies in the drama. The idea of 1-to-nil scores is a boring proposition for American audiences weaned on the gladiatorial battles of NFL action – full of close-ups, instant replays and multiple high-tech camera work.

Then there’s the tradition. In the United States (which once again saw its World Cup team eliminated on Thursday), a soccer “field of dreams” isn’t a national pastime; it’s the peace of mind a parent gets when they dump their kids off to kick a ball around for an afternoon.

And there’s the whole thrill-of-victory thing: Somehow, a yarn about American soccer-loving suburban teenage girls doesn’t rise to the level of “Rocky.”

On the rare occasion when soccer did inspire Hollywood, it was a sideshow to achieve other ends.

Will Farrell’s 2005 flop “Kicking and Screaming” uses the game as a backdrop for gags about suburban soccer kids and a dysfunctional dad’s inability to bond with them.

Also playing it for laughs was “Ladybugs,” a 1992 film in which Rodney Dangerfield agrees to coach a girls’ soccer team made up of his co-workers’ daughters in hopes of impressing his boss and getting a promotion.

John Huston’s 1981 flick “Victory” used soccer as competition between POWs (led by Sylvester Stallone) and their Nazi captors during World War II.

(Hey, how else could Rocky beat the Nazis? Baseball? Football?)

But there’s yet to be a film that taps the drama or intrigue intrinsic to the sport – at least not in Hollywood.

Like the sport itself, soccer movies have enjoyed a popular international run, exploring the game from every angle: its tempo, its international appeal, the hooligans who worship it.

In Britain, home of the ultimate working-class, soccer-loving blokes, the sport has represented everything from the cosmos to class warfare.

The genre kicked off in Britain in 1939 with “The Arsenal Stadium Mystery,” a taut thriller about a player who gets poisoned during a game. The 1980 romantic comedy “Gregory’s Girl” used the game as a barometer of social acceptance: If you can’t play it, you’re an outcast.

Flicks such as “When Saturday Comes” and “Fever Pitch” – which was remade in the United States as a baseball movie – reveled in the crazy devotion fans have for their teams.

“Mean Machine,” a soccer remake of the American football movie “The Longest Yard,” wore working-class grit and rebellion on its snot-covered sleeve.

Britain also produced “Bend It Like Beckham,” a wonderful, feel-good film that transcended the genre. The 2002 movie tells the story of a British girl whose dream of being as good as David Beckham puts her at odds with her conservative Sikh family.

For her, soccer is more than a game. It’s a way out of the confines of a traditional household and sexual roles – and a passport to play before fans the world over.

Like that girl’s dream, “Bend It Like Beckham” became the little film that could. It traveled the world and became a hit, despite lacking the over-the-top drama and triumphant action of so many sports flicks.

In America, it did, well, OK – for one of those movies.

Hey, it wasn’t “Rocky.”