"Once" is very pure.

Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2009)

"Once" is simplicity at its very best. It's a movie made with limited resources and with a small cast & crew, consisting mostly out of inexperienced persons within the business.
It's perhaps a movie that sounds like a very amateur like movie but yet its a movie with some real class. It has a good and simple story, likable main characters and it's all being build up and handled nicely. It's story progresses steadily and often without the use of needlessly many words. The characters and the main plot line tell all of the story. The movie is great in its simplicity really.
It's foremost also really a movie about music and choosing between living the life you want to or living the life the simply have to. Both main characters sort of struggle with this and they have their dreams but also their obligations toward other people close to them. None of them thought about actually chasing their dreams and do what they like most until they happen to meet up on the street.
It's a movie that works through it's simplicity, music and likable characters. But fair is fair, it needs to be said, to me it seems ridicules that Markéta Irglová is being praised so much for her acting performance. Do people somehow confuse amateur and weak acting for a natural performance? It's crazy, I just couldn't get over the fact how horrible her acting was at times, even though she has been praised basically everywhere for it. It's fresh that the movie uses some non-actors in it but really there is a reason for them not being actors. Also simply no way that these people are going to cast in anything else really but somehow I think that they also wouldn't mind this though, since there are more into music really anyway.
Still it's of course amazing for a movie of this size to receive as much recognition and praise as it did. A true accomplishment I bet no one involved ever expected. But it's not hard to see why it has reached such popularity, fore "Once" is an unexpectedly well made and put together movie, that is good looking, benefits from its simplicity with its story, atmosphere and characters and has some nice music in it as well. it's a movie that with its themes should appeal to everybody and it's just hard not to like this movie really.
8/10
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