Periodically - about twice a year, by my calculation - someone tries to breathe new life into the movie musical by putting together a lavish song-and-dance spectacle like the ones they used to make, full of big numbers and bigger emotions. (See, most recently, Dreamgirls and Hairspray.) Against this trend, Once, a scrappy, heart-on-its-sleeve little movie directed by an Irishman named John Carney, makes a persuasive case that the real future of the genre may lie not in splashy grandeur but in modesty and understatement.
Filmed with more efficiency than elegance on the streets of Dublin, Carney's movie, a favorite at Sundance earlier this year, does not look, sound or feel like a typical musical. It is realistic rather than fanciful, and the characters work patiently on the songs rather than bursting spontaneously into them. But its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.
And this is true even if the main style of music is not quite your thing. The principal male character (Glen Hansard) - neither he nor his female counterpart (Marketa Irglova) are given names - is a street musician who favors the wailing-white-man-with-a-guitar mode of folk pop. His songs, full of ringing open chords and vague lyrics, are earnest and self-dramatizing. Their subject seems to be heartbreak, which he has recently suffered at the hands of a straying girlfriend who now lives in London.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF ATOM CINEMA
This information is extracted from him by his new friend, a young Czech woman whose forthrightness he finds irritating at first. He fixes her vacuum cleaner (his day job is working in his father's repair shop) and makes a half-hearted, bluntly rejected pass. But while there is an evident spark of attraction between them - Irglova's teasing directness works beautifully with Hansard's shuffling sincerity - Once is far from a conventional love story. It is, instead, the story of a creative partnership that develops by chance and that involves a deeper, riskier bond than mere sex ever could.
She, it turns out, is a musician as well, a classically trained pianist with an interest in songwriting. Her professional prospects are, if anything, less stellar than his, since she lives in a small apartment with her mother and small daughter and supports herself by cleaning houses and selling flowers on the street. But she responds to his songs and is happy both to sing harmony and to write lyrics for one especially challenging tune.
It seems silly and grandiose to lavish praise on a movie whose dramatic crux is the recording of a demo tape, and there is some danger that the critical love showered on Once will come to seem a bit disproportionate. It is not a film with any great ambitions to declare, or any knotty themes to articulate. It celebrates doggedness, good-humored discipline and desire - the desire not only to write a song or make a recording, but the deeper longing for communication that underlies any worthwhile artistic effort.
The special poignancy of the movie, the happy-sad feeling it leaves in its wake, comes from its acknowledgment that the satisfaction of these aspirations is usually transient, even as it can sometimes be transcendent.
Neither Hansard, who fronts a band called the Frames, nor Irglova is an established professional actor, though both are gifted composers and performers. Their guilelessness protects the movie from its sentimental impulses. A good song - even a bad one heard at the right moment - can cast a glow of enchantment over ordinary circumstances.
Once understands this everyday pop magic about as well as any movie I can think of, and communicates it so easily and honestly that you are likely to want to see it again.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS