This all reminded me of the early Park Chan-wook film, Joint Security Areathat revolves around a shooting in the DMZ between North and South Korea.  JSAisn't as much of a thriller as the box art might have you believe, but it's a fascinating look at the madness that is a single people divided by ideology.  The JSA is patrolled by forces from both sides of the border, and though they operate sometimes mere feet from each other, the soldiers are forced to see each other as enemies.  The building where meetings take place is particularly striking since there's a line running through it that literally marks the border.  Watching all of the formality and rigidity of the exchanges in the JSA, it's easy to see how artificial things like borders and nations really are at a personal level.  And that's what makes it so fascinating to watch people moved to tears by something like a national anthem at a sporting event.

When the two Korean teams were scheduled to play World Cup qualifying matches in the North, the matches had to be moved to China because official North Korean policy prohibits the display of the South Korean flag.  It's hard to understand just how difficult this must be for the Korean people, but Park Chan-wook's film is a good place to start an exploration of that struggle.

When Renton mischievously swaps Tommy's home-made sex tape with a rental tape of great goals, one of the film's more heartbreaking character arcs is set in motion.  Though his friends are just having a laugh by borrowing the tape, Tommy's girlfriend mistakenly thinks that he has returned the illicit video to the rental shop, so she leaves him.  Tommy, the previously clean-cut and fitness minded jock, takes the loss hard and winds up mired in the world of heroin, dirty needles, and HIV.

Boyle's film is so full of style and character that it's easy to see why it was copied so many times.  It somehow made living in a flat with friends, wearing soccer jerseys, and killing time at the pub seem so cool while simultaneously exposing the disgusting underbelly of heroin addiction.

It just looks like a perfect launching pad or docking station, doesn't it?

District 9is an absolute classic sci-fi film, on par with Aliens, Blade Runner, and whatever else you want to throw at it.  It's a movie of ideas that isn't afraid to spray the screen with grue when the alien blasters get to work.  It's an exciting action movie that has such a delicate and interesting ending that it demands a sequel.  2009 was a great year for science fiction films, and District 9 was on the very top of list of provocative and entertaining films.  We might be getting a prequel (which I 'm not-so-thrilled about) but even if this universe never gets touched again, there are enough fascinating ideas in District 9 to keep you speculating for years.

South Africa is off to a good start in the tournament and they have built an impressive and gloriously weird looking stadium.  If their tournament is as memorable as this film, that'll be a great achievement.

Let's also be clear, nothing at all like what you see in this re-imagined DVD cover happens in the movie.  Fever Pitch is a romantic comedy but it is not full of girls dangling soccer cleats in front of their cleavage.  I am pretty sure that's not Colin Firth on the cover either, because if you had Colin Firth on your DVD cover, wouldn't you show his face?  This DVD box art was made to help sell a soccer-themed movie from the UK to a non-soccer-loving audience in the USA.  Way to go, art department!

Fever Pitchis about an obsessive Arsenal fan (Firth) who can't really commit to a relationship because it interferes with his team's match schedule.  This story (from writer Nick Hornby) has so much potential to be creepy and sad and there are many points in the film where Firth's character comes off as utterly pathetic, but the movie wants to give Firth a reasonable ending.  It should have ended with Firth digging himself further and further into a mindless soccer stupor as his love interest got smart and walked out.  It nearly does.  Still, there are some pretty good moments and the movie is an all-too-honest look at football fandom taken to one of its many absurd extremes.

This approach had been tried before in a 1970 film that did nothing more than follow Manchester United winger George Best for 90 minutes, so it seems clear that the film makers weren't interested in breaking new ground.  Still, their film turned out to be an interesting and somewhat melancholy meditation on Zidane, soccer, and a superstar athlete nearing the end of his career.  The film is not at all about the game as the cameras track Zidane exclusively, regardless of where the action takes place on the field.  What it reveals is a man who drags his toe in the grass a lot, who is prone to sudden bursts of activity and aggression, and who spends most of an entire match waiting for the ball and then passing it to someone else almost as soon as he gets it.  At times, Zidane almost seems completely removed from the action of the game, but then as play weaves his way, he snaps into action and shines.

Perhaps that feeling of melancholy isn't really part of the film, but something that is hard to ignore given Zidane's ignominious finale in professional football (he was ejected in the World Cup Final for headbutting an Italian player just as his team was on the verge of taking home the trophy.)  Perhaps it derives from the score by Mogwai that is beautiful, restrained, and always just a little sad.  Perhaps it's a function of the way that this game versus Villareal actually ends up--a strange 'twist' ending to a film that is otherwise devoid of any real narrative depth.  I like to think that Zidane works because all of those things are true, and also because at halftime, the film makers head out of the stadium for a poignant reminder of just what the game and Zidane mean to so many people around the world.  If you can find this, give it a chance.

City of God is a tough movie, but it's also beautiful and ever so slightly hopeful.  It presents a world where falling in with the gang seems not much more dangerous than avoiding it, but where people still make choices.  Watching kids sieze power through violence is always disturbing, but in City of God it's so easy to see how the cycle is hard to break.  These kids are taking lives before they are even old enough to understand what it means to die or to kill.  They only know that having a gun and a gang means getting what you want, and in a place where getting anything is a struggle, that seems like a pretty rational choice.

This might not be a rousing pre-match party movie, but it's an astonishing look at a culture that we don't often see on the big screen.  I loved it, but I didn't have an immediate desire to watch it again.  The film was followed by a television show and a second feature called City of Men and now that I've had time for the original film to settle in my brain, it might be time to watch the sequel.

This 1981 film (called Victory in the States and Escape to Victory elsewhere) drops Sylvester Stallone into a German POW camp during WWII where the prisoners pass the time with pick up soccer matches in the yard.  Stallone is the typical boorish American who only knows how to play "American Football" but he realizes that he needs to team up with the others to make a go at an escape.  Strangely, he does escape, finds a cute French girl, gets plans to bust the rest of the guys out, and then gets himself caught again.

When the Germans organize an exhibition match between the prisoners and a team of Germany's best, the multi-national superstars (including Pele) and their coach, Michael Caine, decide to use the game as a means to escape.  But at halftime, they have a change of heart when they realize that they can win.  Though the film is a little cheesy and Stallone's macho American character Hatch isn't the character that you want to follow, it's still got some great in-game action and supporting characters.  

Pele is fantastic fun to watch and he's nicely contrasted by the Germans who seem like cold monsters on the field.  I love the way that Stallone is useless at the game because he can't figure out how to play without using his hands, but when he winds up sitting in as the team's goalkeeper, it seems oddly prescient.  I don't know if this is the greatest soccer movie ever made, but it's definitely my favorite.

Testsuo spawned an equally disturbing but not nearly as frenetic sequel (Tetsuo II: Body Hammer) and there's a third film on the way this year.  Tsukamoto's films can be hard to watch--the violence is almost comically over-the-top, but it's also brutal and disturbing and he plays a lot with the theme of masculinity.  The movies tend to ride the razor edge of being completely misogynistic but I don't think the violence is supposed to be a positive thing.  Honestly though, with a lot of these movies, it's hard to tell.  Though it's very far away from Marvel's Iron Man, it does go into territory explored in the Iron Man comics, so Tetsuo seems like a fitting end to Iron Man week.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu isn't a lost classic by any stretch, but it's a movie I loved as a kid.  It kind of felt like a weird cousin to things like the Apple Dumpling Gang and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Big Trouble in Little China's Lo Pan might be a better 1980's prototype for the Mandarin, but this film is so goofy and the ending comes from so far out of left field that I thought this would be a fun pick to represent the as-yet unseen villain in the Iron Man universe.  Here's the first couple of minutes of Fu Manchu, courtesy of the YouTubes.

Besides, any excuse to throw an Errol Morris film into a list is good enough for me, and A Brief History of Time is one of Morris' most entertaining documentaries.  Hawking's book takes some pretty heady concepts and illustrates them in clever ways for those of us who didn't study quantum mechanics in any depth.  Morris does a fantastic job of making Hawking's analogies seem whimsical, and he focuses enough on Hawking himself that the movie has a central character unlike so many science films on TV.