Sorry, this movie sucks

Purely Joyful Movie!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I am unable to join - or indeed to understand - what seems to be the universal chorus of adulation for this film. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing the matter with the acting, or the cinematography - the problem is, the plot. There isn't one. It is about a busker who decides he wants to make a demo CD, he gets together a scratch band and they record it. That's it, really. Along the way he befriends a married Czech woman who is waiting for her husband to join her in Dublin, and who plays keyboards in his band. At the end, the busker goes off to London to rejoin his former girlfriend. That's it. End of. The only moment of drama in the whole film comes right at the beginning when a thief tries to take the busker's takings and there is a chase down the street. Aside from that, nothing really happens. Was the demo CD helpful in promoting a musical career for the busker? We never find out. Having made the whole film revolve around the busker's efforts to record this demo, once it was made the director then seems to have lost interest in what happened to it. I don't know if maybe the only point of the film was supposed to be to showcase the music? Well, you either liked that or you didn't. Personally I didn't care for it.

Rotten Tomatoes gave this a 97% rating which is why I watched this film. It was one of the slowest, go nowhere movies I have ever seen. A total waste of 90 minutes. There is some chemistry between the male and female lead but it, like the movie as a whole, goes absolutely nowhere! Don't waste any of your time watching this trash...Also, the music isn't any good either...

Minor spoiler: I thought the beginning was a bit difficult to understand because of the Irish accents, but as the movie went along, I was able to pick up what they were saying. There were sporadic times when I couldn't understand what they said, but I got the main point and gist of the plot. The girl (Marketa) is really from the Czech Republic, she's an immigrant in this movie and speaks both her native language and English, but there's a conversation between her and her mother that is in their native language. In this movie, they do not subtitle that conversation. However, I don't think it was all that relative to the main plot. So if you are from another country and you understand English, then you'll like this movie. I truly wasn't expecting the way it ended, but it was good. The main characters shared a very sweet, enduring friendship that ended up with a nice surprise for the girl (Marketa) and an accepting ex-girlfriend/love. Making friends like that would be so cool. I wish! This movie was just simple and the music was great as well.

Once follows two people: a busker/songwriter and a young woman with a broken vacuum cleaner. As expected of John Carney, the music is great. And similar to his latest film, Sing Street, he is very aware of that and spends at least a solid 1/3 of this movie in song. Most of the music is heard all the way through, and thankfully the music is good so it makes it just that much easier to sit through. While I didn't like the music as much as Sing Street and I think that it did get redundant after a while, thus reducing its rewatchability, it was still good and it's a soundtrack that I plan on revisiting. As for the writing and directing, both were kind of off and on. While the hand-held camera use was suited to making the movie somewhat more lifelike (like a documentary), it could be somewhat nauseating and difficult to keep up with. The directing also seemed like a cop-out for the often faulty writing that proved to be rather unconvincing and awkward at times. But at the same time the music is well-written and some of the dialogue is really good too. My biggest problem with the movie, however, was Markéta Irglová. Her acting ranged from fine to just plain stale. There were so many points where I audibly remarked on how bad her acting was, despite being completely alone on my couch. The rest of the acting is mostly fine, but she was just so wooden. Her lines were delivered with no emotion or tone or anything whatsoever most of the time. It was as if she was just reading her lines off a nearby sheet of paper. Her best acting seemed to come from when she forgot her lines and stumbled over them, which at the least added some naturalism to them. Overall Once is good, but it's ultimately weighed down by inconsistent writing and directing and some poor acting. Sure the music is great, but as a movie it's okay. It's like John Carney didn't know how to get his music out into the world without performing it, so he made a movie about it and didn't hold back. In the end I would really only recommend the movie to select people, specifically ones who would like the musical aspect.