Friday, January 11, 2008

Weekly update ...

No baby. After getting us all excited on New Year's Day, he's decided he wants to think about this whole birth thing. But if he doesn't arrive this weekend, he has a date with destiny on Monday.

Meanwhile, I watched a really good movie this week: Once. It's a little independent film -- a musical -- set in Ireland. It stars Glen Hansard, of the Irish band the Frames, as a street musician/vacuum cleaner repairman, and Marketa Irglova as a girl who sells flowers. They meet and make beautiful music together, though with a bittersweet ending. What I loved about this movie, besides the great music, was how real it seemed. I felt very much like I was there with the characters. It's a quiet movie, in a lot of ways, with the most intense emotion being expressed in the music. Hansard and Irglova are real musicians and wrote the music for the movie. The songs tell a lot of the story and flow naturally from what's happening -- music is their language and part of the fabric of their lives. I like that the characters aren't rich, either. In one scene, the girl raids her daughter's piggy bank to get batteries for a cd player so she can listen to the rest of the guy's songs. She whispers to her sleeping daughter "I'll pay you back." Then she goes out to get the batteries and you see her walking back home, in her robe and fuzzy slippers, singing along with the music. It's sublime.

If you're not good with accents, you might want to watch with the subtitles on, since the sound is often rather quiet and they are all Irish or Czech. The movie is rated R because of the frequent dropping of the F-bomb, especially early on. But that's the only reason. It's a lovely, sweet movie and I recommend it. (It's one of Jeffrey Overstreet's 25 favorite films of 2007, too. Here's his review.)

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