End Credits #317 - October 18, 2023 (Flora and Son)

This week on End Credits, we'll cue the music, and no, we don't mean the usual mid-show music segment. The movie we're reviewing this week is a kind of musical, or at very least a musical celebration. Can the power of music save your soul, your relationships, and your love life? Flora and Son will tell us, and we'll also talk about other movies about making music.

This Wednesday, October 18, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:

The Music, Man! Can you have movies without music? Even in the days of silent films, there was a live musical accompaniment, but as movies integrated sound they would soon give birth to the musical, and along with that, movies about musicians and movies about people making music. True, a lot of those are about famous musicians in bio-pics like The Doors or Bohemian Rhapsody, but there are lots of movies about regular folks making music. We'll talk about a few.

REVIEW: Flora and Son (2023). Writer/director John Carney has made an industry creating movies about regular Irish folks finding love and fulfillment through the power of music. Flora and Son is a lot like that. Eve Hewson is the titular Flora, who's trying to reach her distant son with the discovery of an acoustic guitar, but it's Flora that finds something to sing about as she starts taking guitar lessons from a handsome American teacher over Zoom. The rest of this might seem pretty predictable, so does Flora and Son rock out or is it the tune the old cow died on?

End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.