Once

I've complained recently about the lack of magic and excitement I used to feel when I watched movies. Fortunately, I had a very pleasant experience with a little movie I watched last Saturday on pay-per-view. It's a small movie, very low-budget, and it is also unusually short, only 85 minutes. It is called Once, and it stars Glen Hansard and Martina Irglova. Hansard is a member of the rock group The Frames, and is apparently pretty well-known in Ireland. Irglova is from Czechoslovakia and met Hansard while he was on tour, and became one of his collaborators on an album called The Swell Season. The movie was originally to star Cillian Murphy, but Murphy decided he couldn't sing the songs, and the movie was shot in seventeen days with Hansard and Irglova playing the leads. The cool thing about the movie is you get to watch to great musicians create and perform music together and fall in love while they do it. The movie doesn't go where you expect it to go, and the performances are so fresh and natural they make you think you're watching a documentary. Hansard has eye's that seem to be perpetually widened in surprise and Irglova, wile nearly half Hansards age, has old eyes that have seen a great deal. As, you love watch the movie, you love both these people, and you really care about what happens to them. The ending is sweet, unexpected, and just right. This is a refreshing, spring breeze of a movie.