Saturday, August 26, 2006

Good movies, bon movies

Last night, I was with a group of friends who get together most summer Fridays for some volleyball. Unlike the Wednesday league, it's an actual beach, but not so much actual volleyball. At the end of the evening, sitting around in the pitch dark at 9 p.m. trying to pretend that's not a signal that summer is ending, one guy started trying to get a group together to see Bon Cop, Bad Cop. It kind of warmed my heart (it was also getting chilly there in the dark), since Canadian movies tend to suffer from the same kind of obscurity as Canadian TV, and here were about 10 people getting excited about seeing one.

I'll overlook the fact that half the group were attractive, single French-Canadian women and the guy who suggested the film might have had some strategic motivation for picking a bilingual film. Even the non-French Canadians in our midst had heard of it, and were excited about it. That kind of mass approval for a Canadian film is unprecedented in my experience.

I'd already seen it, and enjoyed it a lot more than your average cop buddy film, which isn't really my genre. It has fun with its Canadianness without getting too cheesy about it.

I frequently say some movie or book or TV show isn't my usual taste, but I have a hard time defining what my taste is. But speaking of movies I've seen recently, Little Miss Sunshine is exactly my taste. I loved that movie. It was poignant, but was also one of the funniest films I've seen in a long time, with a sick sense of humour that reminded me of some of my favourite people (hi big bro!). I was literally laughing so hard I was crying during the climactic scene, even as I was (not literally) cheering the message of it.

I guess two movies don't constitute a trend, but I feel like I'm out of my disinterest-in-movies rut. I suspect I might have overlooked the fact that it almost coincided with summer blockbuster movie season, which means it wasn't really my rut as much as the fact that summer movies tend not to be my usual taste. Whatever that is.