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Saw it, liked it okay but I wasn't bouleversée. Mind you, I saw the French version -- there are two versions of the movie in theatres, the French version (in which the English dialogue is subtitled in French) and the English version (vice-versa). While I've lived in Quebec for a few years, I still have a problem with rapidfire slang -- imagine a French guy trying to decipher Chris Rock going full-tilt, for example -- so a lot of the French got a little lost on me. I'll be renting it to watch it with French subtitles on the French, which is usually the boost I need to get the sense of things.
As a movie: huh. I love the experiment, and I really, really appreciate how they had to make it a pretty pop film for it to work -- if it was some heavy drama or a period piece, that would've tanked, and flat-out comedy wouldn't have really worked either given the respective humour gap between English and French cultures (which is really hard to quantify, but French Quebec doesn't find the same things funny as English Canada a lot of time time).
But leaving the theatre, I felt like I'd been watching a sub-par Lethal Weapon installment with a bilingual twist rather than something really -- I dunno, Canadian. Colm Feore was the static stuffy English dude wearing Danny Glover's pants, and Patrick Huard was the wacky fun French guy playing Mel Gibson. There was kind of a hamfisted hockey theme in there, but that felt a little cloying.
I'm not saying I could have done better, mind you, I just feel like there was a bit of a pandering tone to the whole thing, like on some level the creators felt like it was nasty medicine and they had to sugar-coat it with explosions and hot sex to get Canadians to swallow.
But I'm going to watch it again, and maybe it'll grow on me. |
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