Talk:Bend It Like Beckham

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sources needed[edit]

These points need to be sourced before being restored to the article. Per Wikipedia:Trivia sections, they should be integrated into the main body of the text.-Classicfilms (talk) 20:20, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]


  • The actresses were coached by Simon Clifford, who runs Futebol de Salão, a Brazilian soccer school.
  • The Hounslow Harriers team doesn’t exist, but almost all the players are professional footballers.
  • Many of the wedding guests are relatives of director Gurinder Chadha and played the scene as if it was a real wedding.
  • Jess wears number 7 for the Hounslow Harriers, the same number David Beckham wears for England and once wore for Manchester United.
  • Parminder Nagra was worried that the scar on her leg would prevent her from getting the role of Jess. Instead, the scar – and the story behind it – were worked into the script.
  • Although football-star David Beckham and the term “bend” are well-known throughout most of the world, they are almost unknown in the U.S. As such, when the time came for the film’s U.S release, 20th Century Fox marketing suggested changing the title to "Move it like Mia", to US football star Mia Hamm. Director Gurinder Chadha didn't agree to the name change and the film was released with its original title.
  • Anupam Kher (Mr. Bhamra) is one of the superstars of Hindi cinema (Bollywood) and played in nearly 150 films during the last 20 years.
  • Melanie C wanted her song "Independence Day" to be used in the film but the lyrics didn’t work so she rewrote them so the song could be used.
  • In the original script, Jess and Jules were in love with each other, not with Joe.
  • In the film Jess and Jules are the same age, in reality there is a 10 year age gap between Parminder Nagra (born 1975) and Kiera Knightly (born 1985)
  • Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Tere Bin Nahin Lagda is in this movie but Nusrat was actually dead years ago. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.143.64.208 (talk) 15:40, 2 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The name of the coach and the footballing techniques used are given here : https://www.cinema.com/articles/1989/bend-it-like-beckham-production-notes.phtml As is the information concerning Chadha's relatives in the wedding scene. PhilomenaO'M (talk) 06:17, 1 August 2022 (UTC). According to this article “To cast the team members for the Hounslow Harriers, Chadha and team were looking for athletic, confident girls with good soccer skills. They worked with the UK's Football Association and ended up casting actual players from a variety of school teams.” So they are not professionals.[reply]

Plot Summary[edit]

Information in the plot summary is sparse in some places, while there is too much information in some places. The quotes from the movie are also unnecessary and shouldn’t be included. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.113.98.113 (talk) 03:31, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mr. Bhamra (Jess' father) was harassed off his cricket team in Nairobi, not England (although his teammates were English).Wi2g (talk) 19:52, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think he was discriminated in england. He says he was a fast baller in nairobi and won some (cant remember now) championship but when he came to england the 'goras' didint let him in their club. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Daneyal007 (talk • contribs) 07:44, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Something wrong here: who is Pinky?[edit]

He or she is referred to, but we're not told who s/he is. Cooke (talk) 15:36, 8 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. She's Jess's sister. After only 3 years, I added this piece of information. -- UKoch (talk) 19:34, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And now I found out that it was already there, so I removed my own addition. Next time I'll read thoroughly before I edit. -- UKoch (talk) 17:54, 10 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Butchering[edit]

Someone butchered the article to say that the protagonist's name is Patty rather than Jess and that the film stars Angelina Jolie, rather than Parmindar Nagra. I made the change but someone should really look over the plot summary just in case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 135.196.27.80 (talk) 10:08, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Budget currency conversion[edit]

The conversion GBP into USD cannot be right, a Dollar was not over 1.5 pounds for a long time, if ever. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.196.186.165 (talk) 20:00, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is just a case of accidentally mixing up currency symbols; a quick search showed that most sites estimate the production cost to have been about 3.5 million pound, which roughly translates to 2001 -> $5.040 million (exchange rate on average 1.44), 2002 -> $5.250 million (1.50) and 2012 -> $5.425 million (1.55), these numbers do not take inflation into account.
So if you take 3.7 million pound and the exchange rate of 2012 you get a result of $5.735 million, which can be rounded to $6 million.
As I'am not sure about the policy concerning unsourced budget claims, I will just go ahead and swap the currency symbols to at least remove some confusion. I'll also add the word estimated. Bryan de Bois Gilbert (talk) 12:37, 12 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Recent edit by 83.89.58.74[edit]

I must say I don't like this edit much:

  • The ending of the film is missing.
  • Jess's Sikh background is not mentioned.
  • There are no links at all.
  • Contractions are used.

I was fine with the previous summary. -- UKoch (talk) 17:12, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'll restore the previous summary if no-one objects. -- UKoch (talk) 14:04, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I have restored the previous summary after nobody weighed in--not even 83.89.58.74, whom I tried to contact via his/her talk page. -- UKoch (talk) 21:34, 20 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Recent edits to "Anglo-Indian"[edit]

How is this an Anglo-Indian film? No part of it is set in India, and I don't know of any Indian involvement (other than Anupam Kher playing Mr Bhamra). However, part of the film is set in Germany, so "Anglo-German" might be an appropriate label. Any thoughts? -- UKoch (talk) 19:33, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would consider it a British film and have no objection to "Anglo-Indian" being changed to British. re: "Indian involvement", check the infobox, director, and plot. Hmlarson (talk) 19:36, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, "British" should work. And I took "Indian" as referring to India, so the director and plot don't make the film Indian in my opinion. The infobox keeps being changed too, alas. -- UKoch (talk) 20:38, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ref for rewriting being untrue?[edit]

Where's the ref for this edit? -- UKoch (talk) 22:22, 14 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 7 August 2015[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. (non-admin closure) Calidum T|C 01:47, 15 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Bend It Like Beckham → Bend It like Beckham – Per MOS:CT, the preposition like should be lowercased. Compare Moves like Jagger, Do It like a Dude, Someone like Me. Darkday (talk) 20:09, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support – Seems like a routine application of MOS:CT. —BarrelProof (talk) 21:03, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak support This is recommended in the guidelines, but we should not use versions of titles that don't exist in reliable sources. Only one source cited in the article (Rotten Tomatoes) uses lower case "like" - is that enough? Peter James (talk) 21:47, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - Good call. "like" is none other than a preposition for this title. George Ho (talk) 04:40, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as per just about every review and every catalog and schedule listing. This seems to me style gone mad. It just isn't done this way.
The reference at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bend_it_like_beckham/ makes 5 uses of "Bend It Like Beckham" and one belated use of "Bend It like Beckham". The film posters present "BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM" but the musical adaptation presents "Bend It Like Beckham". The Do It like a Dude example already, I think, pointlessly departs from commonname. To depart from commonname principles so as to decapitalise a single letter within a context of otherwise consistent and consistently used capitalisation seems to me to be utterly unjustified.
See search on "bend it like beckham"
Our article would appear as:
"...",
"Bend It Like Beckham ...",
"Bend It like Beckham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
"Bend It Like Beckham ...",
"...",
To me this either looks churlish or like a typo. GregKaye 06:54, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Greg Kaye and common sense. The movie title includes the capital 'L', so...it's the title. The other examples given are single songs, this is an award winning and well known film. I looked at a few of the sources myself just to check if Greg was right, and, yes, he Spells It Like Beckham. Randy Kryn 13:07, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
How would common sense apply? Can you elaborate? --George Ho (talk) 18:00, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Just meant that it's the name of the film, and has been accepted as the name by media sources far and wide (see the below comments). Randy Kryn 23:15, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're mistaken about common sense. I know that the authors of those sources don't have any clue about what a preposition is and what examples of prepositions are. Learning about a preposition requires knowledge in English courses of any level of education. Proper capitalization also requires knowledge from an English course or handbook about writing English. The authors end up commonly misinterpreting that all words of a title should be uppercased except for conjunction words, like and, or, or but. --George Ho (talk) 03:30, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think that this may be another example of a policy that has been written or influenced by policy editors who do little actual article editing or are just out of touch with the real world. IMO, when policy encourages, I think, out of touch titlings like such as those mentioned, then there is something wrong. See search results on:
Perhaps something could be done by editors who are prepared to endure the bureaucracies of project pages so as to develop an exception such as relating to "Published works" or something.
Everyone else uses "Moves Like Jagger", "Do It Like A Dude", "Someone Like Me" and "Bend It Like Beckham". GregKaye 16:00, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's really uncalled-for, in several ways.
Specifically....
That post comes across as imagining and projecting stuff, to point fingers at people and denigrate. Just because there's a general rule in the English language doesn't mean that everyone who follows it generally, and likes to see it followed here, the way it is in other serious publications, is brainless and can't tell the difference between how titles should be treated normally by default, and what to do when almost all reliable sources use the alternative spelling in a particular case (see !vote below). WP:COMMONNAME is a policy, anyway; there is no need for you to foment some anti-MOS insurrection; MOS itself even specifically says to follow the sources when they're nearly uniform on a variation like this. But I guess it's more convenient to assume it doesn't. I know you have issues with MOS and various rules in it, but you really need to quit blaming an entire, diffuse array of other editors, with radically different interests and backgrounds from one another, because they frequently edit a page that doesn't say everything you want it to. Now that I think about it, I've addressed this with you before (and am disappointed to be in an argument with you about this again, especially after the amount of user-talk we've been through). If you think that regular editors of MOS "do little actual article editing", you aren't actually looking at their edit stats. The principal reason those editors are regular MOS editors is because they do actually do a lot of content editing instead of, e.g., wasting time on ANI and other drama boards, or spending all their editing hours fighting over deletion debates, and are keen to reduce editorial strife over productivity-sucking style squabbles that repetitively embroil article talk pages and edit summaries. MOS is centralized for a reason, and it almost entirely follows mainstream style manuals for a reason, varying mostly a) for technical reasons here and there, b) to balance conflicting interests (e.g. different English language varieties), or c) for reasons specific to encyclopedic vs. journalistic, business, or jargonistic writing. MOS is actually far less prescriptive than most style guides (which are typically nationalistic, against any variation, excessively traditionalistic, and also biased toward particular fields).
PS: "Do It Like A Dude" is not common at all; virtually no one capitalize "A" in that.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:42, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Don't care, but if you are going to lower-case the "L" in like, you should also lower-case the "I" in it, so it reads "Bend it like Beckham." Do sentence case or title case, don't do half and half. GregJackP Boomer! 16:58, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's not a "sentence case vs. title case" issue, but a "lower-case short prepositions" thing. Most style guides recommend this; MOS didn't make it up. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:42, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - a search of reliable news and film industry sources was enough to show me that sources overwhelmingly capitalize all the words of the title when discussing both the film and the musical... what especially settles this for me is that higher end sources - sources that don't normally capitalize short words like "it" and "like" - do so for "Bend It Like Beckham". Consider it a "one off" exception to normally sound MOS guidance if you wish to avoid making a precedent, but it is clear to me that in this specific case, both "It" and "Like" should be capitalized in our title. Blueboar (talk) 17:37, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Right, though "It" would be capitalized anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:42, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose lower-casing in this specific case since the preponderance-and-then-some of reliable sources spell it with "Like". The MOS:CT rule is a default, to which exceptions apply when the sources consistently tell us to apply one. Same reason it's Deadmau5 not "Deadmaus" (and same reason it's Pink not "P!nk" – only her fans and some minority of the music press go with the "!") If usage were widely split in this case, we'd go with "like", per normal, but it's not.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:42, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Blueboar So why doesn't MOS:CT just say "Spell It Like Everyone Else". As per, as far as I can see it, "Moves like Jagger", "Do It like a Dude" and "Someone like Me".
SMcCandlish MOS:CT ambiguously says "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization." I can still eat and breathe with or without capitalisation and the use of the policy description as "unnecessary" has arguably resulted in the article titles mentioned above. GregKaye 19:02, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
MOS is a guideline of general-purpose best practices. The WP:COMMONNAME policy sometimes overrides its considerations, but only when the sources overwhelmingly prefer such a variance. That is the case here. I'd have to look more carefully at "Do It [l|L]ike a Dude", etc., to be sure about those, but I'd bet good money that usage is more mixed, or the RMs on those would not have gone the way they did. If usage is pretty mixed, "avoid unnecessary capitalization" applies. Otherwise virtually everything on WP would be capitalized, because you can find some source somewhere wrongly capitalizing it. Note in this regard that relying heavily on music/film/TV press is WP:UNDUE weight and a WP:SSF problem, because they almost always do what the producers of the media want (that's where their advertising revenue comes from). These sources are not really independent of the subject. Usage in general-audience, non-topical publications tells us what actual usage is. In the case of "like", what is happening is that most people without a linguistics background don't realize that it is a preposition in this particular construction, so there's a tendency toward capitalizing it. Grammar purists will want to lower case it, total descriptivists will want to upper-case it, and I think the tie breaker is a) are reliable sources almost uniformly capitalizing it? When they are, it's probably because the case in question is the title of a published work, and there's a strong feeling, on WP and off, that one shouldn't alter those, within reason. Inclusion of special characters, initial lower case, superscripting, color changes, and other cutesy typographic effects are almost never "within reason", but non-initial capitalization is often considered to be within reason. (Initial lower case is resisted because it makes proper sentence writing difficult; we permit very, very few exceptions, like iPad, and only because the RS also treat them as exceptions almost universally.) When usage is mixed, MOS should do the grammatically correct thing, so it looks like a professionally written publication, not some kid's blog.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:21, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
SMcCandlish Re: "Do It [l/L]ike a Dude" I have again looked at a few pages generated by the "Do It like a Dude" search and have not found a single example of the decapitalisation of "Like". "A" is also typically capitalised. I had already given indication that I had looked into this and you still say "I'd bet good money that usage is more mixed". Please, is there any way that policy be more supportive of real world situations without recourse to wild WP:SPECULATION.
Perhaps we could change the text "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization" to "Wikipedia avoids pointless departures from commonname due to bureaucratic and otherworldly policy pronouncements." GregKaye 10:12, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You're just proving what a shite tool Google "research" is for matters like this and how useless the "sources" are that you're finding. Not a single style guide in the world would agree to capitalize "A" in such a case. Ever. Anywhere. I dare you to find one. Oh, HA HA HA HA, I just did your search. Your "sources" are almost all song lyric sites, people posting pirated copies of the video on tube sites, and other teenage copyvio crap (and even some of them get it right). If you start looking at legitimate entities you see plenty of "Do It Like a Dude", including at Rolling Stone, iTunes, Last.fm, Soundcloud, IMDb, MusicMatch, VMusic, etc. Plus others I don't know much about, including setlist.fm, thescene.com, thesocietypages.org, etc. Saw some lower-case "like" as well, e.g. at prezi.com, whatever that is. I agree that "Like" being lowercased when used as a preposition is probably a lost cause, at least if the original work spelled it with "L", but capitalization of indefinite and definite articles is off the table. I have to note, BTW, that the cover of "Do It Like a Dude" reads "DO IT LIKE A DUDE", so we have no idea what the original intent was (nor could we be certain it was the artist's intent, anyway, without a RS statement to this effect; record companies' PR departments are more often in control of CD covers than the artists, except at minor labels.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  13:36, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. First, that's the actual name, and not a description. Second, newspapers (such as the NY Times and LA Times in the US, and Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail in Britain) spell it "Bend It Like Beckham". LouScheffer (talk) 21:45, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. If the rules of the MOS result in spellings that practically nobody outside Wikipedia uses, then perhaps the rules of the MOS should be re-evaluated. For example, according to the AP stylebook, "like" is always capitalized. But having a Wikipedia MOS and then not using it consistently doesn't make sense. The whole purpose of a style manual is to ensure consistency. Darkday (talk) 23:17, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • And other style guides like Chicago Manual of Style say otherwise. the AP Stylebook is for news journalism. WP:NOT#NEWS.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  13:36, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Bend it like Beckham; Support Bend it Like Beckham. We have precedent for capitalizing "stressed" prepositions from the Star Trek Into Darkness debacle, but we do not have precedence for capitalizing the word "it" in such a title. Therefore, I support a move to "Bend it Like Beckham". ONR (talk) 23:24, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:Old Naval Rooftops we also have a precedent for following WP:COMMONNAME. Can you please explain the rationale for a decapitalisation of the "i" in "It" while all the other words are capitalized? GregKaye 10:31, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Please can you also justify your claim: "we do not have precedence for capitalizing the word "it" in such a title". I did a search on allintitle: it site:https://en.wikipedia.org/ and rapidly found results: It Follows, Feelin' It (Jay-Z song), Fake It (Seether song), Fake It (Seether song), You Wrote It, You Watch It, Fake It (Seether song), Get Over It (Eagles song), Some Like It Hot, Come and Get It (John Newman song)[1][2] and of course Beat It. Also Pay It Forward (novel), Pay It Forward (film), Pay It Forward (financial aid policy) and, potentially conversely, Let It Bleed. GregKaye 11:24, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, MOS:TITLE is clear that "It" would be capitalized. It says that explicitly. Just move on.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  13:36, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment while recognising that Wikipedia is not (meant to be) a bureaucracy I think it may also be relevant to recognise WP:Officialname as "Bend It Like Beckham".[3][4]. GregKaye 11:03, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I feel that WP:Officialname and WP:COMMONNAME both trump the MOS. I would note that several professional style guides capitalize prepositions of more than three letters, and that I would happily give the WP MOS a tremendous overhaul if it were up to me. I have no idea why anyone thought mob rule was a good way to come up with a style guide, or how debates like this are in any way productive. Wikipedia needs a paid copy chief, a benevolent dictator to oversee these matters, period. Krychek (talk) 21:56, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - GregKaye's pinging others, who would oppose this proposal, may fall into canvassing, which is discouraged. I did notify only a few, but I'm unsure if it's also canvassing. Still, relisting this discussion would invite more supporters. George Ho (talk) 04:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Instead, if the rule is this stupid, change the stupid rule, not the smart title. Pandeist (talk) 16:15, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Details about songs in film[edit]

I disagree with this edit. I think the details should be included. -- UKoch (talk) 21:06, 3 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Category:American ... films[edit]

I've just noticed that this article is part of several categories such as Category:American teen comedy-drama films. How is this an American film? -- UKoch (talk) 16:03, 14 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't, so I removed all Merkian categories. -Roxy . wooF 16:09, 14 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Lööks good to me. Thanks! -- UKoch (talk) 18:09, 17 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Me too, but somebody keeps changing it back. Looks like we'll have to do an RFC. -Roxy the sceptical dog. wooF 20:09, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Both Filmportal.de and AllMovie describe the film as a co-production between the UK, the US and Germany. At least one of the film's production companies, Kintop Pictures, is American. What makes you say this is not an American film? snapsnap (talk) 20:27, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's like saying "Twelve Angry Men" is about the British court system. -Roxy the sceptical dog. wooF 21:25, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Bend_It_Like_Beckham&oldid=1206240177"