We just watched this from Netflix a few nights ago, and have since purchased and downloaded the soundtrack, and taken up the part-time hobby of familiarizing ourselves with everything that anyone associated with the film has done in the past, present, and future.
As the title isn’t conducive to searching for past threads, I tried adding the director’s name (John Carney) but didn’t find much.
The awards certainly seemed to stack up nicely for them. I was really, really impressed with the film and the music, and the whole creative process that went into it from start to finish was beautifully simple. More please!
I greatly enjoyed the movie, though it didn’t make me race out to buy anything. My roommate already had the soundtrack when we both sat down to watch it for the first time. It was a great film, and I’m glad she invited me to watch with her.
One thing I don’t get, is the plot summary line on the IMDB site:
I may have missed something, but I interpreted the songs as being tied up in their absent loves, not tied up in each other.
ETA: There was certainly tension between them in person, but the songs all seemed to be written to or inspired by the people who were not there with them.
I found myself humming “Falling Slowly” under my breath the other day, totally unconsciously - it actually took me a couple of minutes before I could finally figure out where the song belonged. I’d say that’s pretty impressive for a tune I haven’t heard since I watched the movie… nearly three months ago, might I add!
The movie is a little bit like the song. It didn’t make a huge impact when I watched it, but I felt a nice sense of satisfaction with it, and I’ve found it sneaking its way into my thoughts every once in a while ever since then. It’s humble and unassuming, but incredibly poignant and meaningful once you give it time to sink in.
Wife and I found the movie very boring. I might have been in the wrong mindset for it, and I’d heard going it how great it was.
I guess the musical nature of it just didn’t grab me as a movie (as opposed to something like “Before Sunset”). The characters didn’t grab me emotionally, so basically I’m just watching an 80 minute piece of loosely tied together songs.
It wasn’t bad. But, it was far from my thing. I liked the music enough, but I’m just saying that if you’re watching it as a movie, you need to care about the characters and I really didn’t.
I loved this movie, as well, and have been wanting an Oscars ceremony to take place this year simply so I could see them perform “Falling Slowly” there.
I haven’t seen the movie, but is “Falling Slowly” considered widely to be a good song? It seems incredibly boring to me, like all the negative aspects of Damien Rice accentuated 100 times. Are the other songs better? I don’t mean to be abrasive, I was just really surprised that this song seemed to receive so much acclaim.
Interesting. I don’t speak Czech, so I didn’t know either. It certainly confirms the feeling my roommate and I had that she really cared about him, but I didn’t feel (before reading this) that she stopped loving her husband.
Part of it is the way that it is presented in the movie. It’s hard to describe, but basically the way you experience it in the movie is that the song is coming together, in an almost spontaneous way, for the very first time in front of our eyes - you can see the electricity between the characters, the look of pleasant surprise on the guy’s face when the girl starts in with a harmony, and it just builds up throughout the scene. It’s right near the beginning of the movie and that scene immediately hooked me in.
It could just be that the music doesn’t move you the way it moves some people and that’s okay, too. If you don’t like “Falling Slowly”, I’d hesitate to say that you’d like almost anything else in the movie. Maybe check out the sound clips on Amazon and see what you think.
They performed it together on Letterman once, I think. At some music festival in Chicago last summer, Glen Hansard picked a random girl from the audience to sing it with him on stage. She actually provided a pretty decent harmony.
My favorite Frames songs are “Falling Slowly,” “Song for Someone,” “Lay Me Down,” “Star Star,” “Fake,” “Sad Songs,” and “Stars are Underground.” I do think that they are one of those bands that sound 100x better live.
Hansard did a cover of “Limmericktown” at a concert once - I wish I had his version on CD or something. I love that man.
“Sorry, I get a little crazy sometimes. Now everyone in the front row is going to be knocked up with little ginger babies.” - Glen Hansard, after a particularly intense song, paraphrased from a concert last year
