For ONCE

It has just dawned on me that the audiences of America (small as they may be, in this case) have already seen next year's Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Now, I know that most people who read this couldn't care less about the Oscars, and in some cases, consider them to be the kiss-of-death for small films that attract a cult following, only to become overexposed and lose their flave of the month status. I've seen it happen many times, most recently with "Crash" and "Little Miss Sunshine." The latter, I believe, is extremely overrated. The former? Well, I saw it on opening night, with almost nobody in the theatre, and walked out, moved. I know many people who felt exactly the same way until months later, when cynical critics started crying "preachy," and "syrupy."

Anyway, I digress, but its my blog, so I'm allotted a few digressions, rants, and in-your-faces.

The film, which is smaller than either of the two I mentioned - in budget and cast - is "Once." Here, I am saying it now, that this film will definitely be in the mix come next February when it is time to nominate the finalists for the big prize. This film is truly special. I mean that. I hate musicals. Hate them! I find them awkward on the screen, awkward and almost unpleasant in the way that everything is designed around the musical set-pieces and not the storyline or the characters. Its like watching a bad action flick, where it is just a series of sequences strung together by a flimsy story. All success depends on style or strength of direction. Mostly, though, I think they're damn boring.

Then, I discovered Once, which isn't a musical per se, but a love story fueled organically by a mutual love of music. And the music, well, the music is pretty fucking good. Good enough that I picked out a few favorites from the soundtrack on iTunes.

I don't really know why I find the film to be so fantastic. Maybe its the fact that it seems to do so much with so little. Maybe its the fact that I discovered it on a small, one-screen theatre amidst a summer of bombastic, Hollywood blockbusters. Maybe, just maybe, its because the film is about two normally fucked-up individuals who come into one another's orbit, realize that they have a mutual love of music, and through that, they come to love each other. Its here that the film becomes a small miracle because these two people, they don't fall into eachother's arms or wait till it rains to share a moment, no, instead, these two people are the walking-wounded and choose not cloud something so pure with the banality of casual sex or he said, she said bullshit. The way the film ends is really quite perfect, which is sort of contrary to the beauty of the movie, but who cares? Really?

Bottom line: see this movie. Steven Spielberg himself has called it an inspiration. Are you serious? Spielberg? Get out there, look past the marketing campaigns of the behemoths of the box office and see this one before everyone turns against it.