Movie reviewers are always a little pompous, and I have no problem with that. But writing a review of other reviewers goes a little far. Personally, I thought this was a pretty decent movie, Canadian or not, and simply assuming that your opinion of the movie is the only conceivable one, and that anyone who disagrees with you is practicing egregious "grade inflation," is beyond arrogant.

I don't think it's 'beyond arrogant' to critique one's own trade, or the work of one's colleagues within that trade. It's simply what should happen all the time.

One of the big problems today is the decline among the professions (all them, from lawyers & doctors to journalists & priests) in the ability and inclination to self-regulate (self-police, self-critique, etc.). Journalists, culture commentators and movie/art critics are hardly sacrosanct molders of public opinion, somehow above criticism...even criticism from within the ranks. Journalists should be critiquing their trade when it seeks to "make" the news rather than simply act as a disinterested observer of the news. This is especially important when there's commercial and/or ideological interests in play.

I think that's the point here - in the opinion of this reviewer, the other reviewers had lost their disinterested observer status and had crossed the line into marketing - i.e. trying to sell tickets for the movie producers.

Absolutelu awesome ondictment on "Official" Canadian Culture - though the film makers are berated sorta the real villian is Ottawa's funding schemes which exclude any voice not propagating the "safe" unity bullshit message.

Oh yeah, my voice was of a hard core inner city urban person and believe me, the themes and reality of my life are not allowed to be funded by the official Canadian Culture Community.

Call me bitter or maybe just someone who doesn't like all this commie/fascist/fatherland/motherland bullshit that is shoved down our throats...oh wait I meant politiclaly correct bullshit shoved down our throats using the commie/fascist/etc methodologies.

uhmm....yeah. It's good that someone (online guy *sigh*) is noticing the dreck that is produced when one must conform to certain politically correct/government-enforced ideology.

And yeah my stories, my stories would sell a helluva a lot more than this shit.

Good reviewer/Lousy Reviewer. Dorothy Woodend/Steve Burgess.

The buddy-cop genre has been rehashed by Hollywood so many time in so many different permutations that it has practically become an industry of its own.

It was inevitable that some artless Canadian producer would adopt this template for the latest CanCon public service announcement. Trouble is, in their effort to pander to the Gov't purveyors of grants, they forgot to do their market research. Canadians don't want tired Hollywood clichés married with tired Canadian clichés. We're more intelligent than that.

Ryu - exactly right.

but it's colm feore!

Someone told me the first buddy-cop movie was freebie and the bean.
Is this true?

Bon Cop, Bad Cop doesn't really appeal to me beyond the horribly bad title.

But there are good Canadian films out there. I saw two Canadian movies at the last VIFF that I was impressed with. C.R.A.Z.Y. and Horloge Biologique (English title = Dodging The Clock). I enjoyed both of them a lot and I recommend them to anyone who loves film, Canadian or not.

That's an interesting theory, jesterjogger. Maybe that was the template for the 48 Hours-Lethal Weapon-style mismatched cop plot. But the idea of antagonistic partners who bond as they solve a crime goes back at least as far as Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

And massromantic, I share your pain. I was stunned by Feore's presence in this movie. Rick Mercer is only playing a small role as an obnoxious host, but Feore is central to the movie. He had to have read the script before saying yes.

Worse than the Jon-Benet Ramsay coverage - It can't be that bad, surely. I thought the raison d'etre of the piece was its bilingual schtick - no reaction from quebec critics?

Are you guys too fixated on the plot?

Wow harsh guys. Does anyone remember Strange Brew? It was no pinnacle of acting or writing or producing skills, but what the hell I still enjoyed it a lot. Maybe I'm wrong, I won't know until I get a chance to rent it because I doubt it's coming to the local theatre, but it seems like you're all being a little elitist here. I mean it's a comedy, and you're embarrassed it wasn't mind expanding enough? Well you haven't turned me off of it anyway. Have more fun people!

Too bad this conversation will be closed by the time I see it, just in case I need to eat my hat. Maybe it will be painfully lame? You haven't convinced me, I'll have to wait and see...

Alcibiades, if you're out there - it appears Roman Catholics are now liable to be legally prosecuted for crossing themselves in public:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5288184.stm

Have nihilist liberal-Left stalinist secular humanists gone totally insane or what?!?

Like, really, what could they possibly be thinking??

I wouldn't worry about it nightbloom, Rangers and Celtic have been crazy for a long time. I had a friend who played football in the North of England some time ago. The first question the guv'nor asked him when he showed up for training was whether he was 'left' or 'right'. My friend thought he meant 'footed' But he actually meant 'Dogan' or Church of England.

Relations between the churches in Scotland have always been mad - nothing new!

And certainly nothing leftist, Stalinist or secular humanist...just plain old religious prejudice: Ask anyone who's lived there.

You're probably right - context is everything. The 'new world' got a few things right after all when they decided to leave the worst of their history behind.

There are many great, excellent Canadian movies out there... problem is, they're all in French... something this film was trying to bridge the gap of...

Personally, I thought it was a resounding sucess. As someone with roots on both sides of the Quebec-Ontario border, I found it to be a hilarious take on our two national pastimes: hockey and (not) getting along with the French.

Here's some context for Burgess... the director was Quebecois and the lead actor in everyone's minds is not Feore. Yes... buddy cop movies are a cliche. So what? Get over yourself.

Oh no! A bilingual film! CANADA IS DOOMED!

I see the point about Quebecois film...and it can be applied to the Quebec arts scene in general. There's a long history of strong government support for the arts there, which explains a lot. Some of the difference is cultural too - the creative pulse is very alive in the mainstream of Quebec society, not just on the periphery, which I find is often the case in starched 'Protestant' and proper English Canada.

Hey folks, the review is an opinion so its not wrong just because you don't agree with it. It was well written, funny, entertaining, and did its job of informing us (not to go to the movie) and then it is up to us to make a decision about going, based on that opinion. Don't shoot the messenger.

This isn't about being a "Canadian" film. I would have read the preview (don't have a tv so likely not have seen it), and decided not to go, period. This kind of film just wouldn't appeal to me, and that's ok. It will get its audience elsewhere.

If anyone out there thinks Canadian films are bad, you haven't yet seen "Eve and The Firehorse", which ranks up there with my favourite films of all time. Absolutely splendid.

"Even and the Firehorse"?? Yeah, one of those films whose review made me decide not to see it, although of course without the review I wouldn't have known it existed. "A heartwearing tale of two Chinese girls dealing with assimilation and growing-up in pre-multicultural Vancouver" (near exact quote of the review, either in the Sun or Sraight). Yawn. Talk about CanCon! Never mind that there was never a "pre-multicultural Vancovuer" (a post-modernist conceit, like so many), the idea that coming-of-age stories should be cloaked in ethnic struggle is, well, nearly as boring as the anglo-french dialectic implicit in the title (and script) of Bon Cop, Bad Cop (or is it Bad Cop, Bon Cop?).

As for Colm Feore reading the script beforehand, this is likely so; but you can't know the man's politics and you have to remember he's a product of the industry and "official cultural institutions" this film's interests serve. And, frankly (speaking as one), actors are whores...a job is a job. Hence that atrocious Tommy Douglas Story, with every name actor in the country cast in it (except for one or two who had legitimate work at the time).

Now, as I don't have cable, I'm regularly subjected to huge doses of Global and CBC; my remote's broken so I can't reach the upper-number broadcast channel of CTV, but that's not much better; and I'm "over the hill" from where people can get KVOS Bellingham (CBS affiliate, or used to be), so I'm pretty much stuck with Toronto-spew on a nightly basis, plus the well-dressed shills of Global's newscast (I don't watch CBC's anymore, because it'll be about AIDS, Lebanon, or heart-warming stories of ethnic girls struggling with assimilation in post-multicultural Canada - oh, that and North of 60, which doesn't look like any Rez I've ever been around...)

Not that I'm a TV watcher; but my back acts up and I have to lie down sometime. But the choices are pretty nasty, as with last night - a few hours on Global or that Train48 thing - a bunch of cliche-stereotype Toronto types on a commuter train, nitpicking each others's lives and, in fact, being the Canadian judgmental "here's what's wrong with you" with their scene partners as though it was interesting. The goofy hoser, the sincere Asian, the powersuited businesswoman having an affair with a nerdy corporate type (who she finds sexy in a way only a Canadian powersuited businesswoman could), the handsome actor, the pretty lesbian, the tearful hipchick, and so on. Caricature after caricature after caricature. And all set on a GO Train, which surely is a universal Canadian experience, no? Pfffffft.

CBC, knowing it had no Canadian movies that might draw ratings (other than political-controversy masterpieces like "Les Ordres" or "Secret Nation", which of course it won't air), had on Tarentino's "Kill Bill". Usually they subject me to the Halifax Comedy Fest, or rerun after rerun of English serials...I almost miss the women's curling championships (NOT!).

I could rant about this crap all day; and believe me I've seen scripts and scenarios that, thankfully, never seem to reach production much less airtime, that are a lot worse...

It's not that Canadians don't have interesting stories to tell; it's just that the money stream up here has to do with insisting on them "being Canadian" about it. That they conform to the government's cultural priorities, or don't produce. But people's individual lives and creations are not the product of bureaucratic agendas and ideological posturing, so there's no common ground. So the tons of good ideas can't get funding, and all the crappy ones get fed as much pork as they can consume. Hence you get Bad/Bon Cop and a lot of other dreck. Paul Gross's "H20" was pretty good, despite some cliches and non sequiturs - but just where it got "hot" it ended, no doubt for political reasons. Censorship by any other name is called budget cutbacks...

And in that case, the director was French-Canadian anyway; English Canada has a long way to go. As for films from out here, I remember The Grey Fox and My American Cousin as being nice set-pieces on BC, despite not much story content; but they LOOKED like BC, and had some flavour that wasn't archly Canadian. They were both cornerstones of the Hollywood North era; but note that the subject matter of the one was an American (Billy Miner) and the other the secondary character was, of course, American.....

Nice to see a bio one day, maybe, of Raymond Burr in tough-town New Westminster. But they'd populate the set with Newfie-speaking guys in mackinaws and have Rick Mercer in it somewhere; it wouldn't be New Westminter; it would be Toronto's idea of a makework project for Toronto actors...

There's all kinds of stories in BC worth telling, in my opinion (many here at the Tyee know I know the history of the place darned well) but I can tell you they'll never get Telefilm funding because "they're not Canadian enough". But even actor bios like Burr's or Yvonne de Carlo's don't get any attention, and BC's heros and anti-heros politically and culturally don't fit the CAnadian paradigm. Sure, you could get funding for a Komagata Maru film or something on the oppression of Chinese railway workers (yawn), but you couldn't get funding for an Amor de Cosmos vs Arthur Bunster flick, or the walking legend of Rattlesnake Bill in the Boundary Country. Not Canadian enough. Whatever "Canadian" is, which of course it should be understood is entirely what the government's marketing consultants decide it should be....hence the boredom, and the irrelevance.

FYI see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hollywood_North

which needs more commenting on, BUT....you'll get the idea...

Bad scripts + coddling reviews = crap culture.

Did you read the script, Burgess? Film is a director's medium. Generally speaking (and only generally), scripts are decent. There are so many of them floating around and only a tiny percentage of them get made. I've read good scripts that turn into crap movies because of the choices a director makes.

What about Bad columns + coddling editors = too much Steve Burgess.

C.R.A.Z.Y was a great film, very creative. Liked that one. I also saw Eve and The Firehorse and enjoyed that too. Haven't seen the latest (Bon Cop/Bad Cop) but going by all the negativity towards it here i'll just have to go see it for myself to find out.

I'd have to say though that you can't blame the producers. They're only trying to get films made, which is very hard to do in this country. Besides, if titles are any indication, I'd have to say Canada's latest can't be any worse than something called - Snakes on a Plane.

Skookum- you're recommending Wikepedia? Oh yeah, there's a reliable source.
Eve and the Firehorse was wonderful, and you don't have to be Chinese or female or raised in Vancouver (or in the 1970s) to appreciate its humour and the stellar acting of the protagonist. You just have to like anything other than the standard formula (dare I say- the male-director dominated Hollywood, trash viewpoint. On that note, I'm off to finish watching The Joy Luck Club (have never seen it!!)

The Wikipedia link is one of my own diatribes on the myth of Hollywood North, and the way Toronto has run roughshod over the rest of Canada's creative sector. And Wiki is more citable, to me, than the unreliabilities of the mainstream media, that's for sure; it's consensual information, albeit half-baked at times, but always open to revision. In this particular case it's trying to keep under control all the bumpf and geewhiz stars-in-their-eyes gunk that people think "Hollywood North" means, and how the term got transplanted to Toronto after it was coined for Vancouver....funny, too, because they used to be "No Fun City".

Hi. I'm a screenwriter. Or , I was. I haven't worked in film or TV for dogs' years. Tangled with the initials, the CBC and the CRTC. Took them, and a producer, to court. Won. Bad move! Cost me almost as much for the lawyer as the judgement awarded me and I haven't really worked in film since. Oh well.

The people who make the decisions about funding have, for the most part, never really worked in film. They sure as hell couldn't work in publishing and stay afloat. They don't read a lot of books. They are more like "business people" who haven't had to make it in the business world (where, I'm convinced, they'd sink in a week). They schmooze a lot. Wear really nice clothes if you can overlook white shoes and sunglasses in the wintertime. They decide which producer will get script development money.

I don't think there's an easy answer to the problems facing Canadian film. The entire pyramid was made somewhere else and then set down on our necks without any regard for the needs of a nation which is almost unmanageably big and so rife with regional disparities as to stagger the mind.

We're told there are no good Canadian scripts. Pish tush and bosh, I have a cardboard box full of them! Every year there are fine novels published in Canada by the few brave and stubborn people who still try to publish in Canada. I've had a few novels published. I haven't noticed a groundswell of support nor a phalanx of eager producers beating a well-worn path to my door in hopes of buying the film rights. Every week I go to my small but excellent library and take out books to read, many of them Canadian, and every week I think Gee, this could be a good film...but somehow those films never get made.

Skooky is right, there are stories in BC which merit the big screen, merit multi million dollar budgets, jesus the story of Simon Gunnanoot alone is enough to fill the theatres...but IF it ever gets made it will be made with US actors and probably from the point of view of the Pinkertons who came over the border to try to find the guy who hid out for thirteen years in the roughest country on the continent...we had the story of the Mad Trapper of Rat River, could have been a great flick, could have looked at the psycho-sexual conflicts and done it with a lot of entertaining action and..we got a yank Dgrade actor and a piece of filmic crap out of that...

Not because we don't have good writers, we do, we have some of the best in the english language. Not because we don't have good actors, we have fine actors who seldom get work of any quality at all. Not because our film crews are dog meat, they're good, damned good.

The problem is higher up the pyramid. When the CBC can take a dweeb out of the sports department and put him in charge of TV drama there's a problem. When people who don't read novels are allowed to decide if a film script is worthy, there's a problem. When those who really and truly can't find their arses to wipe them are in charge of the creativity of other people there's a problem.

I haven't seen the film in question and I probably won't see it, even if it comes to the video rental store. I'm not big on comedy and I'm not big on Colin Feore and I'm not big on good cop bad cop ha ha. I guess I got turned off most ha ha cop stuff because of Donald Marshal, GuyPaul Morin, David Milgard and a few others. Probably my fault. Probably a lack of humour, and that probably because of feminist tendencies and such. You know, the Stanley Park incident and the dead women of the East Side and the pig farmer and all those questions remaining and , yeah, humour challenged when it comes to good cop bad cop...

If any Canadian films of any merit at all ever get made it is in spite of the arstles and dweebs in charge. And I have no idea how we change that.

Simon Gunanoot is definitely on the list I was thinking of, as also the Chilcotin War and the Slumach case. It's not just history, though - it's the particular way things are here that actually could provide interesting filmic material...and I don't mean the scenery, although as with Icelandic and Spanish films that's obviously in the setting/backdrop. I'm thinking of the weird way people are - "the Vancouver snark", and the particular in-their-own-world nature of Surreyoids and Coquitlamites; the general head-trip, on-your-back, scowl-at-a-smile uniqueness of the place. Vs., on the other hand, the sometimes boisterous friendliness of certain places in the Interior or Island, or the easy, cordial down-home way of First Nations socializing.

But as long as rural Canadians are written about by Toronto-oids, in a generic Newfie accent-plus-mackinaw/team jacket, and as long as BCers are styled according to what Toronto needs to think that "seriously WestCoast" means (yawn), who we really are and the ideas and stories that could come out of here on film will never be. The money flow is controlled on the other side of the Great Lakes, by people whose lives are far more boring than nearly anybody's I know out here (and that's saying a lot).

I'll be back about this, and there were some bits in Anne Cameron's post I need to stew on (Anne, if you go to my userpage in Wikipedia - User:Skookum1 pls send me an email from the links on the left; "I have a script idea for you" and while I can "see" the film, I don't know how to take a story and boil it into script and need someone who can...it's history, 'nuff said for now).

But re Anne's post:

Right in the CBC's charter, somewhere in its opening paragraphs, it states that the purpose of the broadcasting monopoly/programming is to "revent the growth of regional identities". In other words, to overturn the ones that were already emerging. This is the main problem; trying to establish commonalities between Cape Breton and the Cariboo DOESN'T WORK, and projecting Toronto's urban landscape/cultural ideology as "the norm" to everyone else in the country as if we should care. In film especially this is totally wrong; but I will submit that the francophone element at the CBC/CRTC/CanadaCouncil don't have the same problems, and those who are anti-anglo ("English Canada has no culture", as PET said), have no problems with the irrelevance of the CBC/Canfilm output; it proves their point; but here's the other point: their funding has been locatin/cutlure-oriented, whereas there has been no equivalent nurturing of BC's identity, or Manitoba's, or .....

Another badly-made USA adaptation of a Canadian story :

Smith! (1969) with Glenn Ford, Chief Dan George, Keenan Wynn, Jay Silverheels, John Randolph, Warren Oates. Quite the cast, but a trashing of a great, and very poetically told novella: (Breaking Smith's Quarterhorse by Paul St. Pierre.

Kootenai Brown, the next hurrah after Borsos' The Grey Fox, was a crashing bore and "flat-looking", and totally wasted Raymond Burr's appearance as a very uninteresting Judge Begbie. Supposedly the story of the Wild McLean Boys has been in production for a while now; I shudder at the result (they were the renegade half-breed sons of Donald McLean, a self-proclaimed Indian-killer who was killed in the Chilcotin War).

Maybe it's better that no CanCon types have tried to make a Brother Twelve pic...best to wait for the Brits to get to him, maybe (as with the very colourful Begbie).

I had absolutely no intention of ever seeing this movie until I read this review.

Beaver hockey mascot!? Evil texans!?

Gold!!!

Skookum1
I've been thinking about the Brother Twelve story and your idea that it would make a good brit production. Can't imagine anyone better than Robert Carlyle as Wilson. Those eyes!

One of the, um, nice bits about BC history is that a lot of the colourful characters weren't, in fact, Canadian, but American and some variety or other of British (often Anglo-Irish as well as Scots). This may be one reason why Canfilm funding - like Canadian historiography - has never seen BC or BC history for what it is, but instead generally tends to try and present BC locations as extensions of The East; hence the Virginian/Bonanza-like flavour to an old CTV series on the Gang Ranch, or the doily-and-manners backdrop to The Grey Fox. In much the same way, in fact, that an American company would rewrite the Simon Gunanoot or Slumach stories to situate them in the US, and possibly even make the heros/anti-heroes something other than natives (as was done with the Boys of St. Vincent's, although that was, as I recall, a Canadian production - but seeking viability in US production).

What I'm getting at is films set in and amid much of 19th Century BC can be cast with name British and American actors; and I submit that it might be very true that American scriptwriters might well write a better, less toady-correct, script than anything a Canfilm/Toronto-spawn adaptation might do. Providing of course, that they don't move the location, as with Smith! and others.

Of course in the case of Brother Twelve capturing the particular post-fin-de-siecle atmosphere of early 20th Century British expats Vancouver Island might be a challenge, culturally; these were renegade Brits (and I don't just mean BT and his clan), not the tea-and-crumpets type which has since become the Victoria/Oak Bay stereotype.

There's a complicated tale involving John Andrew Mara, Forbes George Vernon and, I think, Frank Barnard (of the B.X. Express, or his son perhaps) but I can't remember the details; again, Canadian characterizations are not apt with guys like that; same as casting someone from Ontario as the Kansan farm-girl-turned-wag Ma Murray (I can still hear that accent, though by my time it was no longer fully Kansan). Even the big names involved in the Bralorne-Pioneer Mine speculations were largely American (Frank and Delina Noel, and especially the fancy-pants NYC stock promoter Ben E. Smith - eyepatch, $2000 overcoats, and private PGE lounge/billiards car included).

This gets back to that article of Terry Glavin's in Tyee Books about us finding/rendering our own landscape, discovering and enshrining its eccentricities. I obviously dwell, for my own reasons, on the Bridge River-Lillooet and related areas/eras, but almost any area of BC has larger-than-life characters that, frankly, don't fit the stoic, forelock-tugging Canadian paradigm. Even some of the Canadians - er, Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers - were anything but boring (Amor de Cosmos and WAC Bennett, for starters).

The prairies are (were) full of such characters too. Guys like Tom Sukanen who tried single-handedly to build a ship capable of sailing down the Saskatchewan and eventually into Hudson's Bay and back to Finland. He never made it. There was talk of a movie of his life - which ended in a mental institution - but I don't think it was ever finished. In some ways the history of the prairies has been better reflected in plays and stage productions than anything done on film.

The arc of the 20th century there has been so much more - negative - than BC - which has always seemed to me the place of dreams and new beginnings. Maybe you se that differently though.

I would say frustrated dreams, and new beginnings gone awry, or totally redirected. I just got ion from a 1.5-hour transit hell and have to go to bed, or rather would not stew over this before I do, so I'll come back and give you my thoughts after they've regurgitated a bit.

Transit hell = trying to find a public john open at 11:20 off the Metrotown bus loop; and of course there isn't one, except on the other side of the mall, on the Kingsway side; by the time I'd made it back the bus was pulling out. Someone said I should get on the train and connect at Sperling, but once I got there it had just left :-p and I had to wait another 40 minutes in the cold for the next (and last) 144. I HATE BC TRANSIT. Hell, we could probably make a decent sitcom - a very dark sitcom - based on people getting screwed around by transit schedules and that REALLY ANNOYING robot-voice "Chris" who can't find major intersections, can't hear over bus/traffic noise, and cheerily says, once she's done frustrating you with her inabilities "I can't help you! GOOD-BYE!!".....

You're probably right Skookum1.

later - sounds like hell alright.

Cheers.