Maradona Hits the Big Screen
By: Laurie | May 22nd, 2008
If you’re expecting Diego Maradona to fade quietly into obscurity any time soon, don’t hold your breath.
A documentary about his life, “Maradona,” directed by Serbian Emir Kusturica, premiered at Cannes this week, and it’s guaranteed to be controversial.
For Kusturica, that victory [the Argentina victory over england in the 1986 World Cup] was a triumph by the “third world” over the West, which he said imposes its rule on countries like Argentina and Serbia, using weapons such as the International Monetary Fund and NATO bombs.
“I cannot understand why the earth was not knocked off its axis after the match when a billion people like me jumped for joy,” he told reporters after he and the footballer briefly showed off their soccer skills for the benefit of photographers.
To ram the point home, Kusturica’s film shows the “Goal of the Century” again and again, each time transforming the sequence into animated scenes in which Maradona slaloms past cheating opponents such as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair or George Bush.
Nope. No controversy here.
From the Reuters review:
In thrall to the iconic soccer wizard, the director makes the film as much about his simplistic politics and rabid fans as about his playing career.
We could question whether what Maradona really needed was an adoring filmmaker bowing down to him while presenting his “hand of God” goal as a political act of rebellion against repression.
(Um…dude? A handball does not a political movement make.)
Or we can just remember Maradona back when he really had something to offer the world. Even with his shoes untied.
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Comments
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Funny you should post this today. I just watched “Maradona - The Hand of God” last night and found it a bit more focused on the person and not the player. It was produced in Argentina and was decent. Not sure I would recommend it but for all of us football enthusiasts, especially the Argentine ones, it’s worth a look back at the events that shaped our footballing history of the last 20-30 or so years.
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Let me put this in perspective - Maradona, though an Icon to our people, has been looking for the spotlight in the political arena, and uses his limited knowledge to support leftist communist movements. Therefore, anything Western he hates, anything “1st World” is terrible.
So for someone to transform a hand ball felt round the world to a political point relevant to the in crowd 20 years later is blatantly recreating history.
But.
Maradona is the greatest player to ever play the game. Hands down. That video is one of my personal favs.
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