Once 2007
This is a very low-budget movie about a street musician in Dublin. It is filmed in shaky cam with all the background noise. This is annoying but gives a home movie feel like you are watching everything as it actually happened. The main character is a talented singer songwriter who is challenged to break his status quo by a cute Czech girl who is also a musician. It has a very real feel, as she drops in on his life almost by chance and causes him to do some soul-searching. He winds up challenging her too.
Once avoids a lot of the baggage that a more conventional movie would not be able to hold back on and strips everything down to a simple story of these two people and this turning point in their lives. The movie doesn’t give you a lot of resolution or even drama. There is no boy-gets-girl/boy-loses-girl cycle.
A chunk of the movie consists of the two main characters (primarily the songwriter) singing songs. They don’t break into song as one walks down the street in the rain, but it shows the guy singing on the street in front of his open guitar case, the two trying out a song in a music store, an ensemble recording tracks in a studio. The plot calls for them to sing. The songs are pretty good, though they have the same kind of amateur quality as the film itself. A very good song is nearly ruined when punctuated with a screeching high note. Some of the songs sound just alike, are repetitive, or are simply unfinished. They’re good enough, and probably better than one would expect. And that’s the whole movie. It is simple, home-made, feels unfinished, but hangs together and is better than you would expect. The rough edges prevent me from giving it an A, but the sincerity of the characters, music, and story still made me very appreciative. I’ll give this a B+.
Owned on: Digital