As Good As It Gets

Absolutely Fantastic

A Disappointing Continuation

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Warning : this movie can interest you even though ,like me ,you do not care about football games .JB ,who has falsified his medical file , joins a top athletes training center;he suffers from a heart malformation ,and ,although his passion for football knows no bounds, this health problem hangs over his head like a Sword of Damocles.Anyway ,as his black pal tells him after studying the probability ,"we only have one chance in a thousand to become part of a national team".Although he saw a player (who had a malformation too) die in a game on a TV,he decides to tempt fate: on the field ,he sometimes has deseases ,but he may think that a probability is never something exact, and,as the number of steps increases ,he may approach the stationary distribution of a Markov chain.A random walk indeed.Trained and supervised by a bossy coach ,of course callous but fair ,(pop singer Eddy Mitchell is quite convincing) and his sweet friendly help ,Reza ,whose dream to become a football champion never came true .These are not cardboard characters : JB almost regards him as an adoptive father ,or at least a big brother ,a model ,although this coach assistant (and his boss points it out) is a heavy smoker,which does not exactly set an example of what to do when you want your recruits to become champions.On the other hand , JB has tendency to despise his daddy,Christian ,a widower (they never talk about the mother),a farmer who works in sh.....; after the revealing scene of the manure ,which sharply contrasts with that in the posh restaurant where they won't have any dinner,we do comprehend that he is a good father who thoroughly deserves his son's affection .The depiction of the atmosphere in the changing-rooms and on the field ring true.But the ending may seem too good to be true (with a mawkish song to boot)despite the last lines ,for sportsmen often undergo medical examinations ,all the same !And JB cannot always find a substitute!Of course , there's filler :bland love scenes, games to the sound of horrible songs in English of course ;why didn't they use an Eddy Mitchell one,by the way ? His recording career spans six decades.In spite of these reservations ,"Les Petits Princes "is an endearing movie ,well acted.