Monday, June 19, 2006

Sydney Film Festival 2006: Footy Chicks



Footy Chicks, directed by Rebecca Barry 2006

Now admittedly this was not one of my first choices of films to see at the festival, but as part of my coursework we were all required to see certain films and this was one of them.

Footy Chicks is an hour long documentary about women who basically throw themselves at Australian Footy players. For those uninitiated in Australian lingo 'footy' refers to Rugby in all its incarnations and Australian Rules Football.

Even with my rather low expectations going into this documentary I still walked out of the theater rather disappointed. What could have been a serious and informative look at some troubling issues surrounding the sports and the men that play it, the film basically plays out like a VH1 "Behind the Music" episode.

The documentary follows three different girls as they basically do anything they can think of to sleep with Footy players while intermittantly touching on how things sometimes go too far and the players end up taking advantage of women.

The problem is the film really doesn't even consider a solution, nor does it even do anything more than just scratch the surface of its subject material. To make matters worse the film makers seemed to have a shortage of footage and so reused certain shots multiple times. To me, this is inexcusable for a documentary that doesn't even break the hour mark.

By the time the film had finished, I felt like the only thing the film had managed to accomplish was to reinforce every negative stereotype that you can think of for both men and women.

There was one bright spot to the documentary. It featured at moments an elderly woman who was quite a character and she illicited the most laughs of the film.

* One Star

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