Guys and Balls

Guys and Balls (German: Männer wie wir, literally Men like us, UK title: Balls) is a 2004 German sports comedy/romance film by German American director Sherry Hormann about a gay goalkeeper who assembles a gay-only soccer team to play against his ex-team, which fired him due to homophobia.

Plot

Ecki (Maximilian Brückner) lives with his parents who own a bakery in Boldrup, a (fictitious) small German town near Dortmund. Football, the German national pastime, is particularly popular in this heavily industrialized region and Ecki has been an avid and successful player in a local club FC Boldrup, since his childhood days.

In a decisive game, he fails to keep a ball at a penalty and the team fails to get the promotion to the district league. The team are devastated and get drunk at a party. Ecki is then evicted from the team, with his mistake being used to cover the real reason—the revelation that he is gay that comes about when he is observed by some of his teammates kissing another player Tobias on the mouth.

Ecki is defiant and immediately sets out to form his own team and beat his ex-teammates at their game. So he sets off for Dortmund to find members for his new team with the help of his sister Susanne, who is living there. From the fans of his favorite club Borussia Dortmund he finds confusion, but he gradually succeeds in others places, such as a kebab shop and the leather bar 'Steel Tube' to recruit more homosexual players for his team. Among the greatest hopes are the two Brazilians Ronaldo and Ronaldinho and the actually hidden heterosexual bookseller Klaus.

Meanwhile, he also manages to win the heart of dreamboy Sven (David Rott), who becomes his first boyfriend. Training of the team is done by Karl (Rolf Zacher), an ex-soccer player himself who quit the sport years ago after a stinging defeat.

When the big day of the game comes, the match starts out badly for Ecki's team, but ultimately they are able to triumph over his old teammates by allowing their homophobia to turn against themselves.

Cast

Reaction

Männer wie wir may be regarded as the first major German sports comedy. While this genre is far more established in the United States with movies such as Hardball (2001) or The Mighty Ducks (1992) in which an underdog team is posed to somehow find the spirit to win an important game against a far superior opponent, these kinds of movies are relatively rare in German cinema. It may therefore not be surprising that this particular movie was made by an American-born director.

Awards

• Audience Award of the Connecticut Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2006 in the category Best Feature Film (3rd place)
• Audience Award of the Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2005 in Philadelphia in the category Best Feature
• Audience Award of the Milano Festival Internazionale di Cinema Gaylesbico 2006 in the category Best Film
• Audience Award of Outfest 2005 in Los Angeles in the category Outstanding Narrative Feature
• Jury Award of the Lesbian & Gay Festival Brussels 2005 in the category Best Foreign Language Film
• Le Prix du public of the Gay & Lesbian Film Festival 2005 in Long Island in the category Meilleur Long Gay

Critical reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 36% of 14 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.2/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 60 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.

Joshua Katzman of the Chicago Reader called the film "engaging" and "well-paced" with "a vibrantly funny script". Dennis Harvey of Variety states that the film is "by-the-numbers ensemble dramedy that hits every underdog and gay-fish-out-of-water cliche on the nose". Jeanette Catsoulis of The New York Times said the "script groans with double-entendres" and it contains "lots of cheerful nudity, loving threesomes and more synonyms for "gay"".

See also

• List of association football films

References

External links

• Guys and Balls at IMDb