Once (2007)

Simply A Masterpiece

Sadly Over-hyped

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Once is an amateurish little music/romance film, but touching nevertheless.I like Glen Hansard's type of sound, like that of the one and only "David Gray." It really carries the film, as many of the other aspects aren't explored and are underwritten. It's a very a clever way of marketing yourself in today's world. He has also had some acting experience in the 1991 film "The Commitments," which I also liked. I don't really understand Marketa's character's choice at the end, as she looks out the window. Overall it is a little light on substance, but I liked it.

I am unable to join - or indeed to understand - what seems to be the universal chorus of adulation for this film. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing the matter with the acting, or the cinematography - the problem is, the plot. There isn't one. It is about a busker who decides he wants to make a demo CD, he gets together a scratch band and they record it. That's it, really. Along the way he befriends a married Czech woman who is waiting for her husband to join her in Dublin, and who plays keyboards in his band. At the end, the busker goes off to London to rejoin his former girlfriend. That's it. End of. The only moment of drama in the whole film comes right at the beginning when a thief tries to take the busker's takings and there is a chase down the street. Aside from that, nothing really happens. Was the demo CD helpful in promoting a musical career for the busker? We never find out. Having made the whole film revolve around the busker's efforts to record this demo, once it was made the director then seems to have lost interest in what happened to it. I don't know if maybe the only point of the film was supposed to be to showcase the music? Well, you either liked that or you didn't. Personally I didn't care for it.

Once follows two people: a busker/songwriter and a young woman with a broken vacuum cleaner. As expected of John Carney, the music is great. And similar to his latest film, Sing Street, he is very aware of that and spends at least a solid 1/3 of this movie in song. Most of the music is heard all the way through, and thankfully the music is good so it makes it just that much easier to sit through. While I didn't like the music as much as Sing Street and I think that it did get redundant after a while, thus reducing its rewatchability, it was still good and it's a soundtrack that I plan on revisiting. As for the writing and directing, both were kind of off and on. While the hand-held camera use was suited to making the movie somewhat more lifelike (like a documentary), it could be somewhat nauseating and difficult to keep up with. The directing also seemed like a cop-out for the often faulty writing that proved to be rather unconvincing and awkward at times. But at the same time the music is well-written and some of the dialogue is really good too. My biggest problem with the movie, however, was Markéta Irglová. Her acting ranged from fine to just plain stale. There were so many points where I audibly remarked on how bad her acting was, despite being completely alone on my couch. The rest of the acting is mostly fine, but she was just so wooden. Her lines were delivered with no emotion or tone or anything whatsoever most of the time. It was as if she was just reading her lines off a nearby sheet of paper. Her best acting seemed to come from when she forgot her lines and stumbled over them, which at the least added some naturalism to them. Overall Once is good, but it's ultimately weighed down by inconsistent writing and directing and some poor acting. Sure the music is great, but as a movie it's okay. It's like John Carney didn't know how to get his music out into the world without performing it, so he made a movie about it and didn't hold back. In the end I would really only recommend the movie to select people, specifically ones who would like the musical aspect.

Yesterday I watched a marvelous Irish film 'Once'. This movie won Oscar in 2007 for the best soundtrack. It's really merited price. I liked pleasant and melodic songs of this motion picture very much. But why am I talking about music firstly?Actually, 'Once' is a musical. But this is not that typical one with lots of strange dances and sudden music compositions. All the tracks are the organic part of the story. And this story is about two musicians – not the professional ones, but very talented and sensitive – who meet each other at the right term of their lives. You might think it's an average love story with the corny happy-end and all, but it isn't, as a matter of fact. The characters have their own life paths with some hardships and troubles. They impact on each other's fates positive way and split up after all. It's kind of sad, but very natural anyway. This movie is cozy, warm and realistic. It's about the everyday life with little surprises and wonders, the good people that maybe haven't enough powers and confidence sometimes, and about events that happen just once.