SBIFF: Quint laughs along with the French-Canadian comedy FATHERS AND GUNS!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a review from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. I’m only able to spend the first weekend here at the festival, but I’ll be leaving you in good hands as our very own for reals rocket scientist Copernicus is on the ground from beginning to end.
I’ll be able to bring coverage of James Cameron’s presentation, the writer and director panels as well as a handful of movies.
The first movie I saw was the opening night movie… you can find the title of that without much effort, but in an effort not to kick a non-distributed indie while it’s down I won’t mention the name as I saw that it was about as fuck-awful as a movie can get, despite some real talent involved.
Thankfully my first movie this morning was a better film. It’s a French-Canadian film that’s part of Santa Barbara’s Quebec series called FATHERS AND GUNS. Yes, it’s a horrible horrible title, but it’s a sweet and funny comedy.
It’s a fairly smart comedy set up. You have two cops, a father and son, that are constantly at each others throats. The father (Michel Cote) is always pushing the son, never satisfied with his level of talent and always second guesses his decisions. The young cop (Louis-Jose Houde) is a smart-ass, what I’d imagine is a defense mechanism to deal with the constant rejection of his father.
When one of their mutual friends, an undercover cop, is found out and kidnapped by a biker gang their only hope in finding him is to convince the lawyer of the badass gang leader to turn against the bikers. They find their in when the lawyer (Remy Girard) and his suicidal son go on a father/son therapy trip.
So the two bickering cops sign up and their cover is extremely believable since every pair on the trip are fathers and sons that hate each other.
It really is a great set up for a comedy as the cops start to work out their troubled relationship while also working at gaining the trust of the slimy lawyer. Add to that a while slew of secondary cast members with radical problems like a hippy father and his capitalistic right wing son and, my favorite, the creepily close chubby father and son that are dubbed “the lovebirds” because they’re always holding hands, hugging or, in one particularly disturbing scene, breastfeeding.
So, you have a ticking time bomb element with the kidnapped cop, a fairly heavy dramatic element as these crazy characters really break down as they try to work through their personal issues and then the zany comedy fills the rest of it.
Cote and Houdes are particularly good in the film, constantly pushing each others' buttons, sometimes for fun and sometimes to genuinely wound the other. It's a complicated relationship that is allowed to grow despite all their efforts to avoid the therapy part of the undercover job.
Not surprisingly the film has already been acquired for an English language remake by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. I actually think this could be a very successful remake as long as they embrace the dramatic element and don’t just turn it into an OLD DOGS sequel. And you have to change the title.
Here’s the trailer so you can get an idea of what the flick is:
I’ve also seen the Oscar nominated animated film THE SECRET OF KELLS and will be seeing another Quebec flick tonight… this time a thriller called THE WILD HUNT. I’ll have reviews of those up soon.
