Directed By: John Carney (Once) Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, Hailee Steinfeld, Catherine Keener, Adam Levine
Rating: R for language
Run Time: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Synopsis: Dan (Ruffalo) is a record executive who has fallen on hard times, to the point of losing his job and contemplating suicide. Greta (Knightley) is a British songwriter who followed her singer boyfriend (Levine) to America but gets her heart broken when he hits it big. When Greta sings one of her songs impromptu in a bar that Dan is getting drunk at, he hears and becomes inspired by her music. Together they decide to record her songs in the open environment of New York City as they help each other try to regain who they once were.
REVIEW
Andrew: Hello, dear readers! We're here with the second of our two reviews we're posting today, as last Thursday we checked out Begin Again, the new film from director John Carney, who a few years back came out with a very popular indie film called Once. Once told the story of a pair of musicians in Ireland who fall in love but ultimately go their separate ways, and it really kind of took the world by storm because of its music. It just became a huge indie hit, won an Oscar for Best Original Song, and also lead to a popular and Tony-winning adaptation on stage.
And now Carney's come back with Begin Again, which follows in a similar vein as Once in that it's about musicians, yet is its own film. This movie was about a down-on-his-luck- music producer named Dan, played by Mark Ruffalo...
Sarah: Who discovers a young singer/songwriter named Greta, played by Keira Knightley, who is getting ready to head home to England after a terrible break-up with her newly minted rock-star boyfriend played by Adam Levine. Dan thinks that he can take Greta and do something with her songs; something that will pull him out of his slump that is fueled primarily by booze.
A: This was one that I know I had been looking forward to ever since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year and got good word of mouth. It looked like it had a great cast...
S: And we read the article about it in
Entertainment Weekly and it really just got us excited about seeing this movie
on screen. And finally it has come to our little Indie film theater here in
Atlanta! So now that we’ve seen it, Andrew, did it live up to our excitement?
