"Eleven Men Out" is my first Icelandic film. And as such, I may not be very fair in my review, as I have nothing else Icelandic to compare it to. When compared to the bulk of the other films I've seen, it is wanting.
The box blurb reads [my sidebar comments in the brackets]:
"When the team's most popular and sexiest [Björn Hlynur Haraldsson is a fine piece of eye candy--the films most redeaming aspect] soccer star admits he is gay, the sports world is turned upside down [I saw no evidence of this in the film. The one dimensional team owner was nasty about it, the homophobic general manager was blunt about it, and the coach who was also the man's father, behaved like a snivelling, lying, neanderthal about it--remember this is a comedy.....but no one in the greater sports world seemed to give a rat's ass about it]. Immediately suspended by the team, he forms a gang of other players who have come out, [This is a bold-faced LIE! His friend from childhood invites him to play on his ultra-minor league team. He accepts and his presence on the team starts rumors and eventually the straight players quit one by one, they are replaced by gay men who stumble onto the team for various reason, not one of which is because our former star, Ottir, invites them. Makes me wonder if the guy who wrote this even saw the film.] and what happens next is a hilarious comedy [Okay, that seals it, he clearly didn't see this film] as eleven men out win game after game on their way to the championship. [They "win" a grand total of one game, because all of the other games are forfeited by opponents too homophobic to play them, even in the play-off rounds.]" End of blurb.
Other hilarious characters include a mysogynistic, filthy mouthed older brother, Orri, (played by Jón Atli Jónasson) who runs a video store where he spends most of the time in the back room chocking his chicken to porn or forcing his hapless self-hating girlfriend to give him blow-jobs; Ottir's ex-wife, Gugga, (played by Lilja Nótt Pórärinsdóttir) who plods through most of the film so flat out drunk all she can do is screech at him and stumble around with a bottle of some alcohol in one hand and a cigarette in the other; and a son, Maggi, (played by Arnmundur Ernst) who is so filled with adolescent angst--and given his parents, who can blame him?--that he barely speaks, and even when he bothers to, says nothing worth listening to.
I did learn somethings about Iceland. 1) Apparently, it's not nearly as progressive a society as I had always thought, 2) It RAINS every fucking day there, and the locals carry on their lives without umbrellas as if it were a pleasant sunny day, and 3) the Icelandic sense of humor is very close to what we in the state's would call ennui, and so I shudder to imagine what a depressed Icelander would be like!
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