Czech Cinderella meets broken-hearted hoover fixer guy

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2008)

Markéta Irglová is super cute with her garbled accent and fingerless gloves, walking a broken vacuum cleaner like a sick dog with blue fur and no legs. When she sneaks into a a music store to practice the piano while they're closed for lunch, the hoover fixer (Glen Hansard) asks her: "Did you write that?", and she replies: "No, Mendelssohn did". It's straight out of "The man who wasn't there" of course, only hoover fixer and his date have traded places with Billy Bob Thornton and Scarlett Johansson. But "Once" is the kind of movie you can't possibly stay angry with for very long. The script doesn't do much explaining, which I think is a good thing. I also liked the fact that it doesn't have a proper ending. Like a true story, it's just sort of fades away. Unfortunately, the sound is terrible, especially for a film that is all about music, and what the Irish seem to think of as English will leave most audiences dumbfounded. In short, "Once" is screaming for a Hollywood remake. I'm thinking Liam Gallagher and Milla Jovovich.