"It's not his first appearance on celluloid, of course - as he was the ginger-haired guitarist in Alan Parker's adaptation of Roddy Doyle's novel 'The Committments' from the early 90s.

Apparently he doesn't like to be reminded of this fact, though - I think he lived to regret having accepted the part."

I wondered why the DVD commentary so conspicuously failed to mention Glen Hansard's previous appearance on the silver screen. In fact, the director spoke several times about how great it was to be working with musicians who had "no acting experience."

Now, I am sure that Glen had no previous film-acting experience before "The Commitments," and probably none since, either ~ but he certainly had some prior experience, and indeed experience that was very relevant to what was required of him for "Once."

His character in "The Commitments" was very young, kind of naive and goofy, and was given the extremely goofy first name "Outspan"; maybe Glenn is a bit embarrassed to have his younger self (and indeed a fictionalized and undoubtedly oversimplified version of his younger self) preserved on film. Wouldn't we all? He might also dislike being too closely associated with that soul-music cover-band when his own original music is decidedly different. Or, maybe he just became deathly sick of being recognized on the street and greeted with shouts of "Hey Outspan!"

Still, that younger self of his made for an extremely likeable character in "The Commitments," and I would wish for his sake that he'll eventually come to terms with the situation and embrace all the good things about his earlier filmmaking experience.

PS: This morning's paper referred to Oscar winners Glen and Mar as "folkies." (I'm not sure if that was written by one of our local writers or if the phrase was used in a national wire-service story.) I thought this might be of interest to those who like to debate the neverending "folk/not-folk" controversy. The music in this film wouldn't meet the traditionalist definitions of "folk," of course, and indeed might fall into the category of "Acoutic Rock" that we've recently been unable to define.