It's nice when you decide to kill some time at a screening and the movie ends up surprising you. That was definitely the case with Once, a lovely low-budget musical dramedy from Irish filmmaker John Carney, starring and featuring the music of Glen Hansard, former lead singer of Irish rock band The Frames--Carney played bass in the band back in the day--and Marketa Irglova, Hansard's current musical collaborator. Hansard plays a bitter street-busking singer/songwriter/vacuum cleaner repairman trying to get over an ex-girlfriend by writing beautiful but angry songs about her. One day, he meets a pesky but irresistable Czech girl (Markéta) and they start spending time together developing his songs. Of course, he starts falling for her, only to be wounded when she pushes him away; he soon learns that she has a daughter and a husband back in Czechoslovakia.

This really is a wonderful film, the kind that you can only discover at film festivals and really, the best reason to attend film festivals. Like Great World of Sound (discussed in "What I've Seen"), this is a very small, low budget film with little known actors (Hansard appeared in The Commitments), but the characters, their story and the emotions are so vivid that they grab from the start and have you hanging at their every word. The awkward relationship between this duo is especially intriguing, as they work on their music, even going into the studio for a weekend to try to put their songs on record with a band they also find on the streets.

Once is the kind of movie that could only have been made by someone who has experience making music and who has experienced heartbreak firsthand, and Carney found the perfect subjects for his film in Glen and Marketa, since they already have the chemistry necessary to pull this off. There are so many scenes that make you smile and laugh, particularly watching Marketa walking around the streets of Dublin, dragging a vacuum cleaner behind her (long story), and as someone who has spent a lot of time in a recording studio, I can vouch for the accuracy of the sessions Carney includes in the film.

I was deeply moved by this film--maybe as much or more than with Sarah Polley's Away From Her--and it's a great crowd-pleasing film that is sure to be loved by anyone who makes an effort to see it.

After that, it was back to the Yarrow for another film in the world dramatic competition, being the previously discussed new film from Gela Bablouani, The Legacy, codirected with his father. Sadly, it wasn't nearly as strong or stylish as 13 Tzameti, though it has another interesting central concept, involving a road trip through the Babluanis' homeland of Georgia (that's in Russia). Essentially, three young French people hire a Georgian interpreter to accompany them on a 2-day bus trip to a castle they inherited. On the bus, they encounter all sorts of characters including a young man and his grandfather, who have been caught up in 4 decade blood feud.

It starts out well enough with interesting characters and developments, building up to a fateful confrontation on a bridge--I don't want to give too much away--but from there it's downhill. The writing isn't great and the film's pace is dragged down a bit by the need for most of the dialogue to be translated between the characters. (The subtitles randomly pick which one to decipher for those who speak neither French nor Georgian.) The film does look gorgeous, displaying Babluani's distinctive eye for capturing the perfect shot, and foreign film fans (particularly the work of Fellini) will probably appreciate it. If nothing else, it's good that the movie doesn't focus too much on the character played by Gela's brother George, because I wasn't that impressed by him in 13 Tzameti and he's not much better here.

I only made it through about an hour of Katsuhiro Otomo's Bugmaster, which was slow, tedious, dull, and God only knows what was going on in it. Essentially, the film's cryptic premise involves grey-haired bugmasters, who are part exterminator, part phamarcist, with a bit of witch doctor and GhostBuster mixed in. It's annoyingly slow as it bounces back and forth between two characters and the "bugs" they deal with, which have silly names like "Ahs" and "Wns." There's also a couple annoying little kids, as there often are in these types of movies, which makes one think that Otomo was influenced slightly by the spate of recent Japanese horror. It's a shame that Otomo's attempt at a live-action film set during turn-of-the-century Japan wasn't as interesting as his futuristic animes, making one think that he may want to stick to what he knows and does best.

That's it for the first half of today's madness. Will be catching Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, Guillermo Arriaga's The Night Buffalo and David Wain's The Ten later. If I survive, I'll report on them later tonight or tomorrow.