The Movie- Once

I don't often go to see movies more than once, but you'll have to excuse the pun. I did see this movie more than once. Some have characterized it as a music video expanded to a music movie. Anyway, I really got into this story and the lyrics of the music by Glen Hansard of the Frames. The song, "Falling Slowly" really seemed to be the main message of the whole film.

I found an excerpt from an article on the web that shares some of Hansard's insights into music. Here it is:

Music is medicine and dreams. For me that's what music is, when it's at its best. It makes time stop. It's salve. For me music is a moment of peace, and quietude - ironically. Poetry on the other hand is different. Poetry stirs the blood. Poetry makes men go to war. If you listen to any of the speeches from Bush or the statements from Al-Qaeda, it's all poetry, and that's what makes men kill. For me singing a political song is like me trying to sell you a Volvo, only because it's like selling an idea. If I write a song about a situation, some people can do that very convincingly, but I don't think that I can. It's something I admire. I admire Damien Dempsey for example. It's not even that he writes political songs, he writes songs about social situations and his people. You have to be very strong to write and sing songs like that. If you can see someone like that as a troubadour or a herald, that's not what I am. I'm more like a little cinema. I'm a little world cinema in the corner of the town square, inviting you in to look at something. Follow the story and forget about the politics for a little while. I've always had a real problem with people standing up on a stage and singing those songs. As much as I love Dylan, and as much as I love so many other singers who've done that, for me selling an idea is like using music to sell McDonalds. It's wrong. Not that commerce is bad, it's not, but it's not in the same realm as music. It's like using naked women to sell beer. Naked women are beautiful, they're sacred. They've been depicted through the millennia as being the source of all man's inspiration, and yet you put a woman in an American flag bra and put her with a bottle of Budweiser - you're taking something sacred just to shift some units."