The holiday season

I liked this series enough last year that I'm going to rerun it.


Bonne fete nationale!

And a good Jean-Baptiste. This kicks off the holiday season: Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July in the space of 10 days (along with the Jazz Festival, of course). Viewing recommendations for the national holiday of Quebec: I am not a Canadian (if you don't know what it's a reference to, see here); and just to throw something more interesting and more francophone, if less directly thematic, into the mix, my favorite Montreal movie, Le Golem de Montreal.

Update: I seem to have forgotten to rerun it. Click on the "holiday season" tag to read last year's entries.

Happy Independence Day!

For your viewing pleasure: No more kings!

The Holiday season, con't

A few hours past the halfway mark between Canada Day and the Fourth, go rent Blue State. A cute little charmer of an indie comedy that has a surprising bite to it, this is tale of two Americans trying to move to Canada in the wake of the 2004 presidential election. It paints with a pretty broad brush sometimes, but it does so in a pretty equal-opportunity way (the annoyingly earnest Kerry activist, the Limbaugh-listening military family president, and O, the Canadians...) and mostly in ways that still provide humor based on recognition and on truth. And if some of the movie is more about Canadian stereotypes of Americans and vice-versa than it really is about either place, well, border-crossings are sometimes like that.

Rogue the kid from The Piano Anna Paquin really shines; I hadn't seen her in a lead role before, and while costar Breckin Mayer gets a majority of the character-establishing rat-a-tat dialogue, her character fully balances his on the strength of Paquin's acting.

To American expats in Canada, it's very funny.

Canada Day viewing

What else could it be?

The holiday season

If I've counted correctly, today is halfway between Jean-Baptiste and American Independence Day, which means it's time to go watch Les Invasions Barbares, "The Barbarian Invasions," the widely-honored (including with the best foreign-language film Oscar) Quebec film about death, reconciliation, and retrospective wisdom ("Was there an 'ism' we didn't worship?") that also happens to include some very telling bits about the Quebec health care system and the importance of the exit option into the United States.

Holiday season viewing recommendation #2

We're now halfway between Jean-Baptiste and Canada Day, so get thee to a video store and rent the greatest mismatched-buddy-cop movie about federalism ever made, the sublime Bon Cop, Bad Cop.

More to come!

Bonne fete nationale!

And a good Jean-Baptiste. This kicks off the holiday season: Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July in the space of 10 days (along with the Jazz Festival, of course).