Once

So after reading Cheryl's review of Once I thought it was something I should look into watching. So it was pretty much a no-brainer to get when my friend Matt at work mentioned he owned it and I could borrow it. I brought it home and got Ginger's buy in on watching it after telling her it was a love story. I'm thinking I might have slightly oversold that aspect of it. Apparently I've gone to that well once too often since I got her watching New Amsterdam by telling her underneath it all it was a love story also. And I'm fairly certain this all started back when we were watching the Matrix and I told her that was a love story (for some reason she hasn't really trusted my judgment on describing movies since).

We started watching it and it quickly became apparent this movie wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I knew there was a musical aspect to it, but had figured there was a storyline that was supplemented my music. In fact it's just the opposite and it's actually a lot of songs supplemented by a story (in retrospect Cheryl practically says this, but I miss interpreted it I guess). The filming is low budget and almost has the look of being a shot using someone's camcorder (there's a hand held camera feel to the film) rather than being shot using real film equipment (which ends up giving it an almost documentary feel). But even though it wasn't what I was expecting going in, and it wasn't filmed in top notch quality it still eventually managed to win me over. Read Cheryl's post about all the things that are good about it. It took me almost the entire film before I finally realized I didn't even know the names of the two main characters. But their names aren't important, it's the fact that they have such an impact on each others lives. I will say it didn't hurt that the music was good and really starts to grow on you even though it's very minimalistic. I think Ginger liked the movie better after we had gotten through it and she realized this was a small independent film based around music versus how I had sold it to her. And like I said, the music is good also (we've already ordered the CD).