Once
Last Thursday Brad and I went to see this film by the courtesy and insistence of our friends Liz and Eric Berget. They wanted us to see it so badly they not only offered but pursued babysitting Atticus for us so we would go. This movie is my favorite movie since....well it is now in my "lovely papered cigar box" with The Secret of Roan Inish, America, Amelie, Mostly Martha, and Babette's Feast. Really one of the most cohesive, surprising, beautiful little films I've ever seen. There have been other films where I was delighted with the story and filming and script and acting...the concept. I love this one because it is "quiet" and "real" and hopeful. Because it is clean. Because it has weight -- it has sorrow and consequences and kindness and "connection" and, always what I long for, redemption. But it doesn't preach or throw about tidy platitudes or try to be anything other than what it is: a story about a friendship born out of music and a need for companionship, but also a need to sort through some of the stagnation that both characters find themselves having fallen into. The film is a musical, of sorts, by the Irishman Jim Carney. He asked Glen Hansard of The Frames, to write the music for the film and then decided that both Hansard and his musical collaborator, Czech Immigrant, Marketa Irglova, should play the main two roles, "guy" and "girl" respectively (never named in the course of the story). So surprisingly, this story doesn't try to say that two people "save" one another. But neither is this a nihilistic post-modern story where there are no answers so aimless wandering is our only option. AND neither is it a modern pollyanna humanist morality 'play' where the answer to all things is to believe in oneself and think positively. I hope if you have a chance to see it, you will.
Last Thursday Brad and I went to see this film by the courtesy and insistence of our friends Liz and Eric Berget. They wanted us to see it so badly they not only offered but pursued babysitting Atticus for us so we would go. This movie is my favorite movie since....well it is now in my "lovely papered cigar box" with The Secret of Roan Inish, America, Amelie, Mostly Martha, and Babette's Feast. Really one of the most cohesive, surprising, beautiful little films I've ever seen. There have been other films where I was delighted with the story and filming and script and acting...the concept. I love this one because it is "quiet" and "real" and hopeful. Because it is clean. Because it has weight -- it has sorrow and consequences and kindness and "connection" and, always what I long for, redemption. But it doesn't preach or throw about tidy platitudes or try to be anything other than what it is: a story about a friendship born out of music and a need for companionship, but also a need to sort through some of the stagnation that both characters find themselves having fallen into. The film is a musical, of sorts, by the Irishman Jim Carney. He asked Glen Hansard of The Frames, to write the music for the film and then decided that both Hansard and his musical collaborator, Czech Immigrant, Marketa Irglova, should play the main two roles, "guy" and "girl" respectively (never named in the course of the story). So surprisingly, this story doesn't try to say that two people "save" one another. But neither is this a nihilistic post-modern story where there are no answers so aimless wandering is our only option. AND neither is it a modern pollyanna humanist morality 'play' where the answer to all things is to believe in oneself and think positively. I hope if you have a chance to see it, you will.
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