I know musicals are a treasured genre by many movie lovers but, I must admit, the whole concept leaves me cold. Whenever I start getting drawn into the story, I’m inevitably jarred back into the real world by the obvious artifice of otherwise normal people suddenly breaking into song. It just seems so anachronistic in this day and age. The only other type of music film we ever see are films like U2: Rattle and Hum or Stop Making Sense, but these are music documentaries, not musicals as such. The great achievement of Once is that it reinvents the musical, overcoming the issue of spontaneous singing and mysterious backing music by telling a story about musicians and letting their naturally presented music take centre stage.

Read the rest of this entry »