Un pari de foo...t!

I don't usually like Finnish movies, and I'm not interested in sports. This movie is those both...and I like it! What?

The plot is interesting to begin with - girlfriends/wives of soccer crazy guys form their own team to show the girls can beat the guys. There is a lot of comedy that works fine. In the latter half the momentum slows a bit but stays still interesting. The movie lacks the cranky attitude Finnish movies usually have, and it's quite lighthearted and plain fun. Maybe a bit too relationship-focused movie for me though.

Good romantic drama comedy to watch once but not something I would want to watch over and over again.

The movie tells a story of football (socer) crazed men and their spouses, who loathe the game. The men have founded a dismal little team called FC MeMan and their lives revolve around the sport. The wives and girlfriends have finally had it when in turns out that the guys have secretly purchased tickets to next summers football world championship games in Germany. The women are fed up and in the heat of an argument Anna,played by Minna Haapkylä, proposes a wager to the guys. If the women train for couple of months and then challenge the guys to a game of football and win, the guys will have to give up on the sport completely. If the guys win however, the women promise to never nag about football and will also pay for the guys tickets to the world championship games.

The guys are completely assured for their victory, but Anna has a couple of tricks up her sleeve. First of all she is quite accomplished with the game and her father is a famous football coach, both facts of which no-one is aware of. Still all the other women are amateurs when it comes to football and what follows is of course hilarious moments when the women start familiarizing themselves with the game.

The drama bits feel sometimes a little forced on the movie, but the comedy is really enjoyable. The plot of the movie is very predictable, but it doesn't lessen it's charm in any way. All in all, it's a fairly good comedy from Finland and I'll recommend it to anyone who enjoys a light comedy with a bit of girl power.

I've heard that there is also a German re-make coming out this year. I'm planning to check it out and see if it's as good as the original.

With FC Venus it is a rare pleasure/torture to see a film which is partially well done and partially awful. The pleasure is that all the scenes that are about the soccer game are carefully worked with a good amount of dramatics and game technicalities. The torture is that everything else in the movie is just painful watching.

A good load of fine actors don't really improve a film if directing is terrible; the dialogue is lost in a messy scene of too many people waiting one to recite some limping lines that are supposed to be funny. It is difficult to concentrate on the dialogue as the speaking voice is taped so poorly that it makes you feel that you are completely outsider in regards to the film events. No close shots to speakers and no idea what is generally going on. A lot of talk about sex is used to replace more usual humor. The cameo by Aki Riihilahti and Mikael Forssell looks only embarrassing in this context.

It seems that the movie makers have been too much concentrated to train the bunch of actors to love and play soccer because they have forgotten to finish the drama part of the movie. If that was to hint how much more fun sports is than movies I think it shouldn't have been done this way. The match day is worth watching but it may render you only sad because everything that comes before it is rather unpleasant.

Disclaimer first: there is no way I will refer to football with the S-word. With this out of the way, I will say that this was a sweet and nice little comedy, with some really, really, REALLY funny scenes and lines, that manages to make a few interesting points about men, women and relationships. Actually, the only parts of the movie that require suspension of disbelief are those related to football, but it s a comedy, not a documentary, and the rest is straight, honest fun. I don't understand why our Finnish friends are so hard on it. Watch this movie with your girlfriend, preferably in the summer just before the World Cup, and, apart from a pleasant evening, you may find in the coming days, that the fight for the remote wont be that intense. For the first couple of games. At least. Maybe.