This Nike ad, -directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Amores Perros and Babel, among other movies - is really an amazing short film. It is so quick and so frenetic that it is hard to follow at first. It took several viewings and some Cliff Notes before I got the story line.
The players envision real-world consequences of their plays....after sending a pass that gets intercepted by Ribery, Wayne Rooney stares himself down in a mirror and throws a bottle at his reflection; the stock market crashes in England; the papers diss Rooney; he grows a beard and a gut and winds up cutting grass in the stadium; he lives in a trailer under a billboard of Ribery. Back on the pitch, we see Rooney shake off this hallucination, chase Ribery down and tackle him.
I am not a big soccer fan and, like pro-football, I think that the vignetted scenes with Wagnerian music and a deep base voice-over make it much more dynamic than actually watching a game. But the world cup is a big, big, deal; maybe bigger than the Olympics.
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