Once

I'd love it if someone could explain to me why it took me so long to see Once. I love Ireland, singer-songwriter music, and indie films. I should have been first on line to see it when it hit town for one week last year. But I didn't. I also passed it over repeatedly at our neighborhood video store. Why? I don't know. I was in the mood for zombies not love stories; I wanted to watch it as a "date" movie; I really don't know. Instead, it took the adorable moment at the Oscars for me to get clued in. And then it took seeing Swell Season on TV. Then I realized I had to do it. And now I want to know why I waited so long.

Once is a brilliant little play on the kind of intense, charged friendship that can crop up between a man and woman who connect at many levels at once. The intimate dynamic is very reminiscent of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I felt like I knew Hansard and Irglova's characters by the end of the film, and I cared about them. It was a world I didn't want to leave. As with Hawke and Delpy, these two were friends before the movie came about, and their sense of comfort shines through.

Visually, the stripped-down feel of the film was perfect, and John Carney pulled a few perfect visual moments out. First, there was Irglova traipsing after Hansard with her canister vac along the streets of Dublin. Then, there was a brilliant scene in the bus with Hansard narrating his story on his beat-up old Takamine.

As far as the story goes, there isn't one. The tension holds for the entire film, and all that happens is an album gets made. (Sorry if this is a spoiler for anyone.) By the usual standards we're taught in writing workshops, the story would never fly as a film or a story. It would need something more at stake. Something would have to break by minute 20. To some extent, it's all there, but very subtle. And really, when something is done well, the rules can be skirted a bit.

Ah well... it's a brilliant little flick.

movie adaptations

Just stumbled across Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet on one of my absurd number of cable channels. I don't recall ever having watched it, and I am amazed at how surprisingly—even shockingly—good it is.

Luhrmann's setting of it in a post-apocalyptic Venice Beach works well, and his staging shows precursors of what he did with Moulin Rouge. The color palettes and cinematography take us fully into the world of the film. The acting is, well, excellent. Chris Rock as a cross-dressing Mercutio to John Leguizamo as a goombah Tybalt—it all works. DiCaprio screams a bit much, but otherwise is excellent. And Claire Danes is a delight.

What I also appreciate about the acting and the staging is the way Shakespeare's iambic pentameter is maintained without being played off as some absurdly affected speechifying. The language gets to do its job without being the spotlight, and in the end, the beauty of the writing shines through again.

Little Children, the movie

Excellent movie with strong performances. The insights about surburban social dynamics and tension between two people whose lives essentially preclude their relationship from following its course is near-perfect. I kept worrying that the third line--that of the sex offender returned home--was going to go over the top, but it also seemed well-tuned and human; you could see the emotionally hermetic world he too was locked in. Each of the three threads ended in ways that were foreshadowed early-on, but the filmmakers were careful enough not to tip too much of their hand, so that the ending changed very little outwardly for the core protagonists, while changing everything inwardly.

One down-moment hit when Winslet's character who is apparently ABD says, "My professors would kill me for saying this, but in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist." Of the writing team--Tom Perotta and Todd Field--who have credit for the screenplay, I have to wonder which one crafted this line. Anyone with passing experience in post-modernist, feminist, post-feminist criticism from intensive English degrees knows that this is actually a standard reading of Bovary. Still, it was the right novel for the moment in the plot.

As cliched as it was the closing lines from the omniscient narrator, another nice nod to Bovary--"You couldn't change the past, but the future could be a different story... but it had to start somewhere."--struck the right chord with me. After all, my one worry when I rented the movie was that it might hit uncomfortably close to home. It did at moments, but this sentiment was well-timed as the plotlines resolved themselves.