Goal!

Let's make this clear right now, I'm going to be biased from start to finish of this entry. From the title alone you can conclude that I'd have an attack of footballitis. Which I did the first time I heard they were going to make a trilogy of the beautiful game. And for the better part of the year I went gaga waiting for the first installment to come out.

When the first trailer aired, I went terminal gaga. From the looks of it, it was going to be one heck of a movie. And the actor playing the lead role also caught me by surprise. When reports of the movie first came out, Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) was said to be playing the football hopeful. It definitely wasn't him when I first saw the trailer. But why was he so familiar? And then it clicked. He was that two-faced lout in Imagining Argentina. Believe me, if he was a convincing jerk then Kuno Becker played Santiago Muñez to a T. He was just smoking hot in his shaved head and he genuinely looked like an old pro tackling that football around.

Probably the reason why football is such a huge sport is because it reaches the grassroots in society. Many of its stars don't come from prominent backgrounds. You get in by pure talent. That's what happened to Santiago. When he was discovered by a former scout and got invited to try out for Newcastle United he didn't waste any time flying to England to do just that. He might have been a star in his local team in the suburbs of Los Angeles but unfortunately for Santi, he didn't come up to par when he played in the Magpies' Reserve Team.As fate would have it, he was presented another chance just when he thought he was given his walking papers. He struggles to stay in the squad amid his father's disapproval, his asthma attacks, his own realization that football is a team sport, and English football's notorious clubbing scenes--he met Galacticos Raul, Zizou and (ahem!) Becks in one of those. My fave scene was when he learned he wasn't in the Reserves' starting line-up--only to find out that he was going to be playing with the big boys. What could be cooler than playing the midfield with former England captain, striker Alan Shearer, at St. James' Park?

That was when the real adventure began. And it won't take a football expert to see how much an adventure it was to watch a rising star play against giants Liverpool and Chelsea. If that's not enough, you ought to watch just to see how great a work the editing team did during those matches. Clips from real Newcastle matches were cleverly worked into the film (yes, you can see rival clubs' players the likes of Frankie Lampard and Stevie G running the pitch) that it was too easy to forget that Santiago Muñez was a fictional character and what I was watching was a fictional game. Can't wait for the next two installments.

(Originally posted at The Kookie Jar.)