Ronaldo The Movie

Oggmonster

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I don't think there's ever really been a great football movie. The best one is probably the Damned United.

The problem is for me is that most footballers (except a lavish lifestyle) they tend to be pretty boring people really. Ronaldo is a brilliant footballer, other than that he's hardly an interesting person. The most interesting footballers are ones who have stories or are controverisal characters but most of them are nowhere near good enough to make a film about really.
 

SirAF

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Oggmonster said:
I don't think there's ever really been a great football movie. The best one is probably the Damned United.

The problem is for me is that most footballers (except a lavish lifestyle) they tend to be pretty boring people really. Ronaldo is a brilliant footballer, other than that he's hardly an interesting person. The most interesting footballers are ones who have stories or are controverisal characters but most of them are nowhere near good enough to make a film about really.
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Keane would have been a compelling film tbh. I loved his documentary from 2002.

"It was just a push, I should have punched him. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb"
 

Born2Lose

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Oggmonster said:
I don't think there's ever really been a great football movie. The best one is probably the Damned United.

The problem is for me is that most footballers (except a lavish lifestyle) they tend to be pretty boring people really. Ronaldo is a brilliant footballer, other than that he's hardly an interesting person. The most interesting footballers are ones who have stories or are controverisal characters but most of them are nowhere near good enough to make a film about really.
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I take it you've never heard of "Escape to Victory" :nono:
 

Welsh Wonder

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That United docu-drama about Munich on the BBC was quite a good watch, if incredibly upsetting.
 

Hellboy

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Oggmonster said:
I don't think there's ever really been a great football movie. The best one is probably the Damned United.

The problem is for me is that most footballers (except a lavish lifestyle) they tend to be pretty boring people really. Ronaldo is a brilliant footballer, other than that he's hardly an interesting person. The most interesting footballers are ones who have stories or are controverisal characters but most of them are nowhere near good enough to make a film about really.
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Looking for Eric was great.
 

Mibabalou

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Looking for Eric was a pretty good film, more about philosophy / drama then a football movie.

My favorite are, The Dammed United, United (2011), and The Two Escobars another ill mention is called Rise and Shine it's about Jay DeMerits story from non league to the World Cup in South Africa.
 

Offside

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Mibabalou said:
Looking for Eric was a pretty good film, more about philosophy / drama then a football movie.

My favorite are, The Dammed United, United (2011), and The Two Escobars another ill mention is called Rise and Shine it's about Jay DeMerits story from non league to the World Cup in South Africa.
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Did not like that. They had Matt Busby resembling some sort of ice cold chief gangster.
 

Summit

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Offside said:
Did not like that. They had Matt Busby resembling some sort of ice cold chief gangster.
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I think you have to look passed that tbh mate. The film brings you back down to earth about where we've come from and how spoilt we are now. I love it.
 

Offside

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Summit said:
I think you have to look passed that tbh mate. The film brings you back down to earth about where we've come from and how spoilt we are now. I love it.
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Had some decent parts. Loved the way it showed how important Jimmy Murphy was.
 

Summit

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Offside said:
Had some decent parts. Loved the way it showed how important Jimmy Murphy was.
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Aye. It brought a tear to my wife's eye and she doesn't follow football one bit. The film in itself is about Charlton and Murphy tbh, but I understand where you are coming from regarding Sir Mat. I still think it's fantastic though and the film really does make me feel proud (even more than I normally do that is) to be a United fan.
 

ThierryHenry

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Brown Toothpick said:
As a snapshot of what life must be like for Cristiano Ronaldo, there is one clip in the new film Ronaldo when his godson is being baptised and there is a small gathering around the font. The baby’s head has just been wet when the priest looks over to the tanned guy with the gelled hair and whips out a mobile phone. “Any chance of a quick selfie?” he wants to know.

Then there is the moment Portugal’s team are training at Estádio Moisés Lucarelli in São Paulo during the last World Cup and a sobbing girl breaks the cordon to run across the pitch in a desperate attempt to reach her hero. She is shaking, crying, close to hysteria and caught by one of the security guards. It is The Beatles at Shea Stadium all over again. Ronaldo hugs her and she looks as if she might pass out. “He knows I exist,” she wails, when a television reporter stops her a few moments later. What did he say? “He asked me to stay calm and stop crying.” And what did you say back? “I asked him to follow me on Twitter.”

It must be suffocating at times even if, for the most part, Ronaldo gives the impression that fame is his comfort blanket. The film is a remarkable vanity project and, even more than before, it is difficult not to come away with the feeling that Ronaldo must shout his own name during sex. He and his agent, Jorge Mendes, appear to have a relationship of mutual worship. Mendes, Ronaldo says, is “the best, the Cristiano Ronaldo of agents” and it is difficult to keep count of the number of times they get lost in each other’s eyes, reminding one another of their success and wealth and shiny brilliance.

Mendes – sharp black suit, Rolex, phone almost permanently to his ear – seems almost as hung up about Ronaldo winning the Ballon d’Or as CR7 himself. It is a 24-7, twitching obsession, on both their parts, given far more relevance throughout the film than Real Madrid’s Décima or anything else, and it is a telling moment when Mendes and one of his associates can be heard muttering darkly from one of the Bernabéu’s executive boxes about the possibility “the other guy might destroy everything”.

That other guy is Lionel Messi, cast in a slightly villainous Ivan Drago-style role that he probably does not deserve. “It’s a card inside an envelope that can change so much,” Ronaldo says of the Ballon d’Or, describing what it is like being expected to fake a smile on behalf of his old adversary. “To see Messi win four in a row was difficult for me. After he won the second and third I thought to myself: ‘I’m not coming here again.’” Watching this film, it becomes clear just how difficult it must be for Gareth Bale, signing for Madrid as the most expensive player in history, to deal with that planet-sized ego.

Other scenes are strategically laced with soft-focus Hello! magazine-style moments where Ronaldo can be seen playing with his son, Cristiano Jr, or dropping him off at school, but there is not always a great deal of charm elsewhere. Muhammad Ali and Brian Clough had great humour to go with all the braggadocio. Ronaldo’s style is not so attractive. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he says, explaining why he went to the World Cup with an injury. “If we had two or three Cristiano Ronaldos in the team I would feel more comfortable. But we don’t.”

A touch of humility every now and then would make Ronaldo much more appealing. Equally, he is as good as he is because of the way he is and a documentary of this nature, filmed over 14 months in his company, does show the enormous strains that come with the territory.

At one point his mother, Dolores, is filmed inside a chemist’s handing in a prescription for sedatives because she can barely take the stress of watching him play. Ronaldo rings and asks if she has taken her tranquillisers yet, as if he is quite used to it. “Its quite complicated to be the mother of a player who needs to win,” Dolores explains. “I suffer a lot.” When he is playing in the World Cup she asks for her flip-flops and then walks up the hill rather than watch with the rest of the family.

It is this insight into the inner circle that reminds us it has not been straightforward for Ronaldo, and not just because of the fact he left his family in Madeira at the age of 12 to join Sporting Lisbon, with his first pimples on his forehead and braces on his teeth. Hugo, his older brother, now runs Museu CR7, the Ronaldo museum, in Funchal but, at 20, was spiralling into alcoholism. Hugo says it could have been him who played football. Instead, he worked in construction, and he says everyone drank in that game, particularly as he was used to seeing his father, Dinis, knocking it back every night.It isn’t in the film but Dinis and Hugo resorted to selling Ronaldo’s Manchester United shirts so they could pay for more booze.

Dinis, we learn, was never the same after being called up to fight in the Portuguese colonial war in Angola. He came back “very angry”, Dolores explains. His head was filled with images of the war and though she says he always cared for his children she also says she became “his victim”. Dinis drank himself into an early grave, dying in 2005 when Ronaldo was 19. “He was drunk nearly every day and when that happens it became hard to have a conversation,” his younger son recalls. “I didn’t get to know my father for real.”

As for Cristiano Jr, possibly the star of the film, Ronaldo explains that he always wanted “my successor” without going into any other details. His son is five, already doing sit-ups and still working on his pronunciation of “Lamborghini”, and Dolores takes care of him while Ronaldo is away. The mother? It’s anyone’s guess. “People speculate that it was with this girl or the other or a surrogate mother,” Ronaldo says. “I’ve never told anybody and I never will.” How a man in his position has managed to keep it secret is remarkable and, unorthodox as it might be, fair play to him.

These parts are fascinating and, at times, Ronaldo comes across as so lonely it is a good job he enjoys his own company so much. “In football I don’t have a lot of friends. People I really trust? Not many. Most of the time I’m alone. I consider myself an isolated person.” It pains him that his father is not around to see his success but Mendes, he says, is like a father and a brother rolled into one. In Guillem Balagué’s new book about Ronaldo he writes how, to feed the competitive beast, the player’s entourage quickly came to realise “they must keep criticism at a distance, or control it, create the narrative and keep him on his pedestal”. Mendes is always there to fluff that ego and tell him he is better than Messi, and everybody else. It is far more than just the usual player-agent relationship.

Here, too, is the revelation that there was very nearly no Cristiano Ronaldo either. “He was an unwanted child,” Dolores explains. She considered an abortion and, on a neighbour’s advice, drank boiled black beer before running until she was on the verge of fainting, hoping to force a miscarriage. It didn’t work – and she seems pretty happy about that.

Thirty years on, the film – released on Monday and put together by the people behind Senna – does at least help us understand Ronaldo some more and the incredible drive that is needed to reach the top of his profession. It is not Ronaldo’s talent that stands out the most. It is his competitive courage, his absolute refusal to believe anyone can possibly outdo him and a level of self-obsession that makes one wonder how he will cope now he is approaching the age – two years older than Messi – when the powers gradually start to decline.

In recent years, he says, he and Messi have started talking to one another in a way they never did previously, asking about each other’s families and other polite small-talk. “I’ve started seeing him as a person, not a rival,” he says. “But we are always busting our balls to see who is better.”

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/nov/05/cristiano-ronaldo-film-messi?CMP=share_btn_tw
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Brilliant article. Thank feck I don't have to watch the film now.

Do you think Messi defines himself in comparison to Ronaldo? I get the impression that the obsession for the Ballon D'or is completely one sided:

 

swooshboy

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There's a good interview with him in FHM this month. I find it funny that people are so quick to bash him for having no humility, taking himself too seriously etc, when almost everyone who has played with him and knows him, says the opposite - that he is funny, doesn't take himself seriously and gets on with everyone.

Here are a couple of bits from FHM:

“United treated me like a son,” he says. “I was there for six years and had some unbelievable times. Many of my friends there have now left the club, but I am in touch with Nani, Anderson, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra, Fletcher. And, of course, Giggs is now a coach there – we had a chat when we saw each other in the USA. I speak to thekit man, everybody. I have fantastic memories of being there.”
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Every returning club legend is obliged to say good things, but according to René Meulensteen – Manchester United first team coach during Ronaldo’s stay – the goal machine practises what he preaches. After Real Madrid played Manchester United in 2013 at the Bernabeu – a match in which Cristiano scored – Ronaldo made an appearance in the away dressing room.

“We saw him briefly before the game, but afterwards he spent a lot of time with his old teammates. I spent a good 50 minutes with him talking about his time in Madrid and how much he enjoyed his time at United and the work we did. He’s a very respectful, intelligent boy. Sir Alex will tell you – the whole United dressing room will tell you – the moment he walked in, we knew we had a special player.”
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And this is what Darren Fletcher said about him:

“People don’t believe Cris has a great sense of humour, but he never took himself seriously. He’d be in front of the mirror telling everyone how beautiful he was. He probably meant it, but he was also laughing at himself. He liked to make people laugh and because of that he was extremely popular. “People forget he didn’t speak English when he arrived. He was determined to learn the language and he studied very hard. He was speaking English very quickly and with that came an appreciation for our humour. He’d put on a Manchester accent – ‘Ey up lad’, that kind of thing – when he could barely speak English. Confidence wasn't a problem. “In training, he’d do these flicks and tricks. He’d always be on the training field, trying to improve. If it didn’t work at first he’d keep going – and he’d get it right eventually.
“He used to blow us away every day because of how good he was. What really came through is that he loved life and football – that was obvious from day one.”
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R'hllor

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That moment when you make a decision to pay to watch this...
 

TakeMeHome

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Just watched this and I really enjoyed it. Brilliant film imo.

You see a totally different side to him.

Not much footage of him at United it mostly features footage from the past few years, the world cup and some childhood clips
 

Brown Toothpick

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The movie is already online. Most reviews were bashing it, and twitter also says people were leaving mid movie. I'm gonna give it a watch and see how it goes.
 

Tyrion

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I don't see the point in the film and I doubt I'll watch it though it might be an interesting watch. Personally I don't understand why he does things like this. If he's so lonely or sensitive, why show your private life to the world? I would do the opposite. Maybe it's just part of his (apparent) need to be loved. He's always so nice to United when he speaks to the point where I think it's forced.

In his defence, Madrid is an absolute circus and the only sane thing to do there is to focus on yourself. It's what everyone else at that club seems to do.
 

VorZakone

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It's all money. A docu about him at an age where he's slowly declining keeps his name in the spotlights. He's preparing for a career after football.
 

MTF

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The most elementary contradiction about his Ballon d'Or focus to me is that he plays a team game. Its not tennis, its not F1. The only awards that really matter are the ones a team wins. And by that measure there are many players more successful than Ronaldo.

Maybe there's no way he could've pushed Barcelona off the top during the last 7 years (CL & La Liga). But there's got to be a point where his focus on himself and his goals aren't the best option for the team. Anyone who's ever been in a team sport at any level has seen this, the unit always beats the individual, and too much of any individual can be toxic to the team.
 

sammsky1

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Just watched it. Enjoyed it as Im a fan of his football and loved him during his United days.

Whether we like it or not, he is the most extreme version of a boy done good and deserves every success he gets because of his dedication and hard work.

He come across well in the movie.

But it was a bad movie. Better to have been a TV documentary.
 
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