Drugstore.com Coupons
How I felt about it. Bend It Like Beckham was a huge indie success. It made a ton of money, but its lasting legacy was to launch the kareer of Keira Knightley, the skinny tall pirate hottie from the lucrative Pirates of the Carribbean franchise.
Although technically an independent film, Bend It Like Beckham knows how to please an audience: give them a happy ending. All of the problems of our heroine Jess melt away in the final minutes. The sister is happily wed to the high caste family. Jess gets to play soccer on a scholarship while hanging out in America with her best friend Jules. She even has her dreamy former coach panting for her, a feeling she covets. Best of all, her family now supports her decision to go to America, unaccompanied by any Indians, to play soccer. This is strictly Hollywood, or at least the British version of it.
If the ending is fantasy, perhaps so is the notion that Jess is so talented that she immediately becomes the best player on her team, when her previous experience was playing soccer for fun in the park with a few of her friends. Jules' own passion for the coach, much more developed than Jess', drops out of the story. And wouldn't it have been more interesting if Tony had not been revealed gay, or if Jess had a parent-arranged marriage that she had to heartbreakingly break to achieve her dreams?
Bend It Like Beckham raises interesting themes, then treats them cavalierly. The second generation Indian-English woman must choose between family or aspirations. This dilemma is solved via an audience-pleasing happy ending. Are young female athletes prone to convert to lesbians? Not in this film, despite the hand-wringing (and played for laughs) worries of Jules' mother (Juliet Stevenson). Should one refuse prospects for a plum career or marriage in order to chase a long-shot dream of playing women's professional soccer? No serious debate here. The answer is yes, because that is what the audience wants to hear. And pandering to the audience is what matters, because they will be the ones who pay for tickets.