Few soccer films go the distance

With the World Cup in full swing, we wanted to recommend some movies about soccer to get you into the spirit -- you know, between the live games from Germany you’ve already been watching three or four times a day. Choosing the best of the bunch was hardly a challenge, as there has been only a handful of truly satisfying films about the sport.

“Goal,” a recent Walt Disney film about an L.A.-based Latino player with aspirations to play in Europe’s super leagues, made that painfully clear. Rather than evoke the Zen of the sport, it devolved into a cheese-o-rama about Daring to Dream. (There are two “Goal” sequels on the way -- forgive us for not holding our breath.)

Last year’s “Kicking & Screaming” and 1992’s “Ladybugs” created throwaway comedies out of a timely subject: the emerging generation of American kids who play the game. And what more do we need to tell you about 2000’s “Air Bud: World Pup” beyond the title?

There’s no lack of great films about other sports. “North Dallas Forty,” “Semi-Tough” and “Any Given Sunday” are just three football films that would make anyone love the pigskin. “The Lou Gehrig Story,” “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “Bull Durham” knocked it out of the park for baseball. “White Men Can’t Jump” and “Hoosiers” were three-pointers from, respectively, downtown and Middle America. And there may be no finer sports documentary than “Hoop Dreams.”

These dramas deliver powerful stories, whether the viewer cares about the sport -- plus they offer a resonant evocation of the game itself. Of course, because so many Hollywood filmmakers -- and their American audiences -- grew up playing these sports, the quality and quantity of these films are hardly surprising.

The best movies about soccer come, not too surprisingly, from the rest of the world. “Shaolin Soccer,” a personal favorite from 2001, is a cartoonish, kinetic film from Hong Kong that features soccer players with gravity-defying abilities. It suggests “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” with a ball.

Another one, “The Cup” (also known as “Phorpa”), is a 1999 Bhutanese film in which two novice monks duck their monotonous duties so they can catch a live broadcast of the World Cup final.

“The Other Final,” a bittersweet, touching documentary from 2003, follows Dutch filmmaker and soccer fan Johan Kramer as he organizes a match between the planet’s two lowest-ranked soccer-playing nations -- Bhutan (again) and Montserrat -- for dubious bragging rights.

Perhaps the best-known movie about soccer is “Bend It Like Beckham,” a 2002 British charmer about a teenage girl soccer player obsessed with superstar David Beckham. Directed by Gurinder Chadha, it grossed $32.5 million in the notoriously soccer-resistant American market. Its secret? It was a funny movie about old and new generations in a British Indian family as much as it was about football.

Other soccer -- or football, we should say -- movies have great elements to them. Robert Duvall’s 2000 “A Shot at Glory,” for instance, used a camera crew with extensive experience shooting real-life soccer games. The extraordinary on-the-field footage almost made up for the movie’s flat story and Duvall’s “Scottish” accent. And John Huston’s 1981 “Victory,” in which Allied prisoners of war are ordered to play their German guards, should be seen for the casting at least: The POW team includes Pele and Sylvester Stallone.

If Hollywood filmmakers can make great movies about the sports they love, why can you count all the great soccer flicks on the toes of one foot? Perhaps the answer is in the free-flowing nature of the game itself. Soccer provides no respite. The referee just blows the whistle and 22 pairs of feet have at it, chasing that ball up and down the field (or pitch, if you want to impress your friends with “footie” vocabulary). The play is interrupted just once, at the half; the stops and starts, compared with American sports, are minimal. This makes the game hard to stage convincingly. Football, basketball and baseball move in short, easily filmable bursts, and their hand-to-hand maneuvering is somehow more camera-friendly.

The problem may be as simple as this: Soccer is too spontaneous to capture. For its fans, that’s a kind of bragging right in itself.