Memorable, crazy movie

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

In a remote village in western Ireland, the village simpleton runs the local garage. People are generally kindly disposed to him, though he can be the butt of their humour or a shoulder to cry on, but nobody really cares about him. The garage owner takes on a young lad to help out at weekends, and the two get on well. However, things go wrong when he innocently provides the lad and his mates with alcohol, and shows the lad a blue movie he'd been given. Following complaints, his world starts to crumble as the Garda tell him to keep out of the town, a girl he was attracted to says she is not interested, and the garage owner lets him go on account of scandal avoidance. In the end he drowns himself, as an acquaintance has drowned some puppies. Before doing so though, he releases a penned in horse: he and the horse find freedom in different ways. Very slow and elegiac, and not a good advert for the warm and friendly people of Tipperary, but still very well observed story-telling.

Anybody who's travelled through the southern west of Ireland may already feel acquainted with such a quiet, semi-rural service station, how someone would fill up your tank for you - and that person might be someone a little like Josie.Josie, naturally but superbly played by Pat Shortt is a slow and steady sort of bloke, who, one summer gets some help and company at work from a 15 year old work experience youth. Natural conversations develop and flow and soon, the normally insular Josie is, unknowingly bitten by this and is soon drinking cans with him and other local lads.However, it is an object that is given to Josie by a travelling lorry driver that awakens senses in him. Its mechanical portrayal of an normally extreme emotional and intimate nature subjects Josie to an skewed stance of women. The only known cast member (to me, at least) Anne Marie-Duff is the subject of his very moderate but maligned attention. She is friendly but firm on the matter.A further instance of poor judgement - one Josie didn't even think about - turns, quietly, his world upside down.Other reviewers have said how bleak the film is. I disagree. The ending, yes but generally, it has the feeling of a laid-back character-led indie film. Modest in aspiration, budget and final outcome. That same outcome is one the most oft used, from Greek literature, Shakespeare and so on. To my mind, it says a lot more about how outside influences can affect, dramatically, an area and a way of life not used to such. And maybe Ireland itself feeling the pressures of such, with traditional moral values being risked, though the film is certainly not preachy.Take 'Garage' as a quiet character piece that gently makes its point.

Believe me this is the most slow paced, void of dialog, boring independent-ish film I've ever seen. It makes Sling Blade look like an action flick. I was watching it to fight off insomnia one late night. Unfortunately it didn't work because after sticking with it to the end I was blown away by how the depiction of desolate rural Ireland life actually drove the story and gave deep meaning to the unbelievable end.So don't get discouraged and grab that remote because you're so bored with this movie you just can't watch another minute because the deadpan, eventless story line really does say something about our society and modern life in a way that creeps up on you and slaps you in the face and makes you think.

Garage is an Irish film directed by Lenny Abrahamson who tell us the story of Jossie, a forty-year old worker in a petrol station who will show us his day by day working there. This character is so curious due to the ingenuity and natural way of behave with everyone around him. He also does not distinguish anyone by his age, he speaks equally is "friends" in the pub or the boy who begins to work with him soon after. This character tries his luck looking for love too, but this try do not work.We could define him as a curious, simple and lonely man. Curious because of his own peculiarity, his typical way of view the things, and nobody understands him. Simple because he talks about the most evident and common things, but to him are very important, because he has no other ways of entertaining, rather than to maintain a conversation with other people about the most superfluous things of their lives. We have an example at the very beginning of the film, when he talks about his experience working on the petrol station with a truck driver who has stooped his route to fill the petrol tank as if there was not anything better in the life, as something exciting and that keeps him busy all the day, when the reality is completely the opposite. And lonely, because although he is surrounded by people, he feels alone, abandoned, because nobody understands him, the way he lives, the way he asks, also the way he moves...we could talk about a man rejected by the society, because he is keeping stuck, and on the deep of his thoughts he knows it, he recognizes this idea that Ireland is growing, is changing from the rural civilization to an industrial one.The film shows us the cruel reality- although our main character will not affirm this assumption- of a man who does not adapt himself to the change his city is suffering. My point of view supporting Josie's behaviour is that he feels happy and fulfilled with his life, because he has selected this life, as he will make us know during the story, and in my opinion all of us we should have a little bit of Josie's way of life and Josie's way of see the life. He does not need much to feel happy with the things and with himself. He does not aspire to have a wonderful house or a wonderful life or a wonderful job. He lives with only the necessary things, he works in the petrol station because he LOVES his job, and he only aspires to have a girlfriend/wife who only loves him, and appreciates him just as he is. Other characters during the plot of the film seems to have more than him but they lacks also personality to reach the happiness Josie feels with very little. I think the public will feel identify more with these kind of characters than Josie at all, and all of us we should put a little of Josie in our lives, because we will appreciate more the things we get without being ambitious, without aspire to more and more, just given value this little things that makes us happy, as Josie does.Verónica Molina Mínguez