Once

I write these for friends and if you love movies you are a friend: I saw a movie last night that was so good that I have spent the last hour looking up information about it on the Internet Movie Data Base and related links. I have included the Fox Searchlight website for the movie at the bottom of this review so you can hear the music. So now I know that is was made in 17 days and at a cost of less than $150K and reflects a Dublin of 10-15 years ago when Dublin was much poorer and more working class.

And, I would be much poorer in life and spirit, and my heart, like most of us, covered in scar tissue from life, would not seem so vulnerable and new, if I had not seen this movie. A simple story of a street musician in Ireland, singing covers during the day for Euros, and his own music at night for cents. A verging on middle aged man, still living with his Da, repairing vacuums in a tiny shop and writing songs to his lost love in his tinier bedroom. Approached by girl, an immigrant, who loves his songs, understands the pain that gave them life, and soon they are in a music shop with the girl playing the piano and together they prove that art isn't produced from big budgets or green lit by ten vice presidents and that seventeen days and a pittance can make me get goose bumps just trying to write a review of what I saw in a dark theater with ten other people in a complex dominated by Shrek, Pirates, and Spiderman.

I knew a woman once who only read novels about unrequited love. What a wonderful phrase: unrequited love. Archaic, unrequited, love, universally known and unknown, and as a friend said about the movie and its songs: no great art came from happiness. But the movie isn't sad, it's pulsing with life and music and incident and the process of how art is made. I have always been a sucker for movies about how art is made: Shakespeare in Love, Topsy Turvey, as examples, but in both those, art that was known. In Once, on the streets of Dublin, an Irishman and a Czech girl, remind us of how, to my generation, the guitar was king, a guitar, bass, drums and piano a symphony orchestra, and there was no power like the power of rock and roll. In all generations, love sought, found, lost, and sometimes regained is the stuff that brings us to the theater, to the book, to the movie.

I'm in the midst of reading a book by an Irishman, a detective novel, the hero a reader, and the author uses the book to list books he likes: from one...'the body moves on, the mind stays and circles the events of the past.' This must be true of the writer/director.

You won't forget these people. I can't forget their songs. We should all meet, my movie loving friends, and talk about this movie in a bar in Chicago I know that has great music on the jukebox, cold cold beer, and is dark enough so we would all look good. Neil Young sang: only love can break your heart, Once asks 'how often do you meet the right person', and as fellow movie goers I ask how often can the right movie be made, shown in your local, and break/make you heart at seven of a beautiful summer's eve? It's the best movie of the year. Maybe of the last five years. But, I am not a dispassionate critic, I loved it.

ONCE is a film to see and cherish for the magic of song and music combined in the setting of Dublin for a young man and woman who meet and who make wonderful music together. The only issue is she's married to a bloke in another country. But that doesn't stop them for creating a wonderful piece of music which will stay with them forever.

John Carney has directed and written a brilliant film which tags at your heart and makes your feet dance all at the same time. "Guy and Girl" are tremendous in their parts and the humor and passion they bring to their music. Dublin is such a great location for this film and it resembles London in so many of its blocks of buildings. The bond is also wonderful to see between father and son and the encouragement which the father gives his son.

ONCE gives you a time in your life when you meet your soul mate who brings the music to your heart you have always dreamed of...as well as a Hoover vacuum-"who knew?" See ONCE, because "once" you do, you may come back for more.

Watching "Once" is like sitting in on a jam session. It's mellow and relaxed. It doesn't amount to much, but it's pleasant enough.

The director has said that he set out to make a movie so simple that the story could be summarized on the back of a postage stamp, and he's succeeded. An Irish busker meets a Czech émigré, and both flit around the edges of falling for each other while recording a demo album of the busker's music. Both are struggling with the loves in their lives, he with a girlfriend in London, she with her estranged husband and father to her little girl. The resolution of their stories, what resolution there is, felt right and realistic. This isn't a fairy tale, but neither is it Shakespearean tragedy. Life simply goes on.

The film's biggest asset is its music, and indeed most of the songs in the film we see performed in their entirety. The movie isn't exactly a musical in the strictest sense of the word, since characters don't spontaneously burst into choreographed musical numbers, but like the best musicals, the songs in "Once" illuminate the characters and play an integral role in the storytelling.

A low-key little gem of a movie.

Grade: A

I too saw this film at Sundance, and we were treated to a live performance afterwards by the two main characters, who are actual musicians and not actors.

I can't say enough good things about this film. It is bittersweet and romantic, with great music (not Irish music, but the singer/songwriter type) as the two main characters collaborate on their songs and help each other become stronger and face the romantic challenges they both are suffering from. The end of the film is wonderful and Hollywood-cliché-free! I hope this film gets the distribution it deserves, because I'm going to be telling everyone to see it.

I have to say I loved this film. I went to see it with a Japanese friend, and she loved it too.

So the plot wasn't full of 'save the world' ambitions and the good guy wasn't a millionaire playboy, but who cares? It was a gorgeous straightforward film about two people meeting at a certain time in their lives.

I read a quote recently about someone who'd seen the movie and came out wanting to hug everyone they met - and I totally agree. I cycled home humming the tunes and feeling like I haven't felt from a film since seeing 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. I know, I know - totally different films - but the zen-like feeling after seeing them both...

From a Dublin dweller, it was fun to watch the geography, as the film makers played with the locations in that certain venues were on the same street - yet it looked like the actors had to walk through town to get to them. It definitely hindered the 'who do I know in the public street' shots moments! But was interesting, as helped make Dublin be a different city to what the residents would be used to.

My recommendation is to just go and see it if you're on for seeing something uncomplicated, feel-good without being too mushy, comedic moments that everyone can relate to and some singer-songwriter music thrown in.