Once

Once
a foreign drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -3
Apparent Rating: 3/10

I know there is often a disconnect between the summary describing a movie and what the movie is really about. Some of that has to be not spoiling the viewing experience. Some of it might be the translation from Irish English to American English. But this is not a movie about two people falling in love with each other.

The songs in this have a lot of catchy bits to them but they are annoyingly repetitive. As I get older, I find even popular music from my teenage years to be inane and repetitious, but most of these songs had one verse and a 3-verse-long chorus. There’s one song that says “When your mind’s made up/there’s no use fightin’.” fine. It’s part of the chorus, and most songs repeat the chorus several times, but there were more than a dozen instances of that couplet. Even that does not convey the irritation. The guy sings it in falsetto. In a minor key. As a duet with the girl even though the drama bits of the musical indicate it wasn’t about her. And she chooses the minor-fourth harmony. It was the accoustic power ballad dirge love song set on “Repeat1″. 15 minutes of 85 minutes. Seriously. It was the song that never ends. It says on the movie jacket that the actors wrote the songs and won an Oscar for it. Must has been a low-competition year.

Bad subtitles that didn’t include the important bits.

The movie skims over the parts that made their relationship (as non-lovers and non-friends) by showing a silent clip sequence.

But the whole movie is supposed to be upbeat, showing how a man who works in a vacuum cleaner repair shop can find a girlfriend and record a demo disc— supposedly so he can “make it big”. But he was just helping his dad out in the shop, it wasn’t like he didn’t have a career before then. The girl was at least a decade younger than him, a foreigner, married, with a child— so she wasn’t for him. And by the time the one song of doom ended, I’d rather punch the guy than listen to him play.

Ireland looks beautiful when you see it on travel programs, but it looks like a hellhole in this movie. Apparently they  saved big bucks on filming rights by shooting at 4am in back alleys. Everything is grim and dark and underlit and overlaid with this miasma of filthy despair. It was odd because I couldn’t imagine anyone living there making any strides toward success, but that was the premise of the movie. I think someone put a camera filter on because a story that’s about people working hard to make themselves happy can’t be of artistic value, only suffering and pain can have artistic value, so they had to artificially make Ireland look like Tartarus.

The story might have been interesting if I could have identified with the characters.

The female lead was… what do you call it when someone moves to a country but has no intention of staying and becoming a citizen? that’s not immigration. Anyway, one of those. She doesn’t have a regular job, she accosts people on the sidewalk to sell them junk like homeless person magazines and dead flowers.  She meets this guy who is busking on the street. (I hate that too. The world is loud enough without people deliberately adding noise to it in public.) They make friends with each other and eventually she brings him home, she’s so young she lives with her mother, but she has a toddler. So we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because she’s in a strange country with a child and no husband and trying to keep a roof over everyone’s head when she can’t find a real job. But I don’t believe that. I think if you take a chance with your life, you don’t bring your vulnerabilities and try to use them as a shield. I think you don’t emigrate to a country where you barely speak the language without a job lined up. So I’m a hard-hearted person, but I had zero sympathy for her.

To sum up, I hated the guy. I hated the girl. I hated the music. I hated the setting. I might have liked the story if they had used other characters and it had been set somewhere the sun still shines and the music was less annoying. But then again, I didn’t especially like Music and Lyrics, which is exactly what I just described wanting this movie to have been.

The Lost Language of Cranes

The Lost Language of Cranes
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

Somewhere there are people who intended this to be a good movie with an involving story and coherent allusions and great acting. Those people are probably ashamed of what this movie became. It isn’t quite that bad, but there was all this intellectual stuff about children who are raised without parental influence end up speaking their own languages (the “lost language of cranes” is about a toddler who modeled his communication off building cranes because he didn’t interact with people.) But there is no clear association between this lost language and how a gay man learns to find his way in the world.

The production values on this DVD are terrible. It looks like someone ported the VHS to DVD. The subtitles are mediocre and necessary because it manages to sound even more foreign than the English setting would imply.

Anyone considering viewing this movie should be aware that there is brief but full view male frontal nudity. There is no real sex, very little physical interaction at all, but at one point a man gets out of bed and walks toward the camera with everything showing.

The beginning of the movie seems to be about the relationship between Philip and Eliott. But the movie’s summary says it’s about Philip and his father. It also seems like it’s about Eliott and his roommate who is the sociologist. And it seems like it’s about Philip’s father and mother. And about Philip and his new love after Eliott deserts him. There is no clear thread connecting these stories what-so-ever.

Philip’s mother is one of those disgusting cows who thinks everything is about her house while she’s having an affair and her husband is leaving her for another man. But the way it’s shown, we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because everyone else is progressing and she’s been left behind. I do agree that the ability for people to openly express their sexual preferences is progress, but I do not agree that being homosexual is better than being heterosexual, so that cannot be thought to be progress inherently.

We are also supposed to feel sorry for Philip’s father because he’s been a closeted homosexual for more than 20 years. Mostly though it seems like something he’s brought on himself by dishonesty. No one forced him to marry a woman and ruin her life too.

I don’t know where Eliott fit into things, except he was a gay man raised by two gay men and still managed to destroy his relationship with Philip. And Eliott’s roommate, the sociologist woman, suddenly bags her whole thesis near the end of the movie for no apparent reason except the movie is ending and she wants to be able to go out with Philip and his new love.

For the people writing the screenplay, please to be remembering not to put the plot and characters in the blender and taking out chunks at random. This movie was not worth watching, but throughout there were glimmers of movies which might have been fabulous.