Last night's funny moment from French class did not involve my bellowing a very American "crap!" when I discovered I suck at math in French as well as I do in English. Nor did it involve my tortured pronunciation of "fruits frais"--I sound at best like a three-year-old asking for "fwee fway"--for which I am somewhat famous in certain circles in Montréal.
Non, last night's humo(u)r was supplied by a fellow student who shared a "French moment" with the class when she began describing the plot of the movie Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a 2006 Québec-The Rest of Canada co-production and box office tour-de-(uh) farce in that big country located somewhere north of us.
At least I thought it was funny. I had to laugh because I think I am one of a handful of Americans, let alone French students in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that could contribute to the plot points and recall some of the jokes from the movie, which is something like the third highest grossing film of all time in O, Canada.
C'est un petit monde, or something like that, to say the least.
I first became acquainted with the movie during a job interview in Kitchener-Waterloo around the weekend of release in summer 2006. The movie was pretty much everywhere that weekend. Even one of the weekly alterna-papers at the time of release had redubbed its editors and writers as either bon cop or bad cop in the masthead. Lorne McGuinty, Bon Cop. Genevieve Simcoe, Bad Cop. You get the idea.
Despite because a huge hit in Canada, the movie never crossed south, suffering perhaps from a cultural triple whammy of Canada-made, half or more of the dialog in French, and a plot involving a serial murder among the "hockey community." I think we can all agree that pretty much spells box office death in these parts.
Eventually I found it on Netflix, and I liked it better than I thought I would. A crowd-pleaser to be sure with a fair amount of blood, gore, and some very broad humor. A couple of examples--the very graphic "body of work" you'll see in the trailer (was that really necessary?) plus this ongoing joke--hated (at least in Canada) National Hockey League (NHL) commissioner, Gary Bettman, is parodied and pilloried as a very short-statured, malevolent whiner who goes by the name of Harry Buttman.
Huh huh. Harry Buttman. Get it?
So the movie's no Incendies, nor a Jésus de Montréal, nor even a C.R.A.Z.Y. Still, it's a funny, silly, popular, if somewhat standard-issue cop/buddy flick that's actually more entertaining and less cringe-inducing than the trailer would lead you to believe.
As added incentive to watch, Patrick Huard, the Québécois lead, spends a lot of screen-time shirtless and possibly even trouserless, at least if memory serves.
Pray tell me how can this be wrong?
Except that Msr. Huard also was responsible for the scenario upon which the movie was based. So being that he probably crafted the scenes in which he appears less than clothed, he is automatically disqualified as boyfriend material on account of a raging case of ego.
Nevertheless, one can observe and learn from the poor moral choices of others.
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