(Originally posted Tues., Oct. 10.)Some hard-core fans of the Trailer Park Boys probably hated the the movie. That was inevitable.
Yours truly doesn't qualify as a hardcore fan of the show... it was no skin off my nose not to have Showcase on the cable package this winter and thus miss Season 6 of the show. Besides, the series peaked with the Season 4 finale, the Rita MacNeil episode, which climaxed with Ricky and a dress-wearing Jim Lahey (don't ask) in an armed standoff in downtown Dartmouth. Still, I have been a fan since 2002, long before most people, and have found playing with a Conky finger puppet to be an effective stress-buster.
Trailer Park Boys: The Movie is uneven at times, but it delivers. Some of the DIY trappings of the TV show have been Hollywooded out. The dialogue is more tightly scripted -- for instance, Lahey gets off only one good "shit analogy" rant.
The plot meanders a bit. The same was true, though, of other quote-unquote Canadian cult classics turned out by Hollywood -- Strange Brew, Wayne's World, and of course, Slap Shot.
That's tolerable, however. What pokes through is TPB's true spirit, which doesn't merely lie in the characters, the screwy situations and their sustaining belief that everything's gonna work out, but in how the show sells hoserdom to Canucks.
This country's becoming more and more urban, more Americanized, more diverse. Ricky, Bubbles and Julian and their various associates are beloved first and foremost since their antics are funny, but we also need them since, well, we miss them and the walk of life they represent. It's no wonder that people always see elements of the neighbourhood losers they knew grewing up in these guys. So what if your neighbourhood probably didn't have a guy living in a car?
The show has always been hoser bathos, never more so than in the Trailer Park Boys Christmas Special, where Bubbles learned the reason his parents left him was that his dad got in trouble by "drinkin' and shootin' his mouth off down at the Legion."
A Mordecai Richler character once mused that if Canada had a soul, it was in dingy little small-town bars, and so it is with TPB. The movie has more than enough of non-government-sponsored Canadiana, the kind that has road salt all over it.
When Ricky comes on to his girfriend Lucy in the movie, saying, "I'll get some chicken, some liquor, some hash, we'll bang, and listen to April Wine," what's funny isn't his idea of romance, but how he drops in the reference to the '70s/'80s-vintage mid-level hoser rockers, as if mentioning April Wine in and of itself will gain Lucy's love. (Which it almost does.)
Another Nova Scotia trapping is Ricky's pronouncing tournament "turn-a-ment." It's a little subtlety, but being by being very particular, it takes on a universality. There's plenty of little slices that Canadians will get -- including Ricky's goalie gear for prison ball hockey, which includes a lunch tray blocker and a milk bottle mask.
A related reading is that Trailer Park Boys can be seen as a parody to all those well-meaning low-budget Canadian movies and TV shows of the '70s and '80s that were striving so hard to be anti-Hollywood and define what was Canadian. Whether consciously or not, the Boys subvert that idea of depicting everyday Canucks by turning its salt-of-the-earth hosers into out-and-out cartoons.
So when you're seeing Trailer Park Boys: The Movie, you're sort of seeing remnants of every painfully earnest Canadian movie or TV show that you ever gave a chance before quickly getting bored and flipping to a U.S. station. That's part of the reason the show and now the movie are so big.
We do like seeing ourselves on the movie screen, after all.
It used to be you couldn't find a Canadian movie in a first-run theatre and if you did see one, you only saw it out of ostentation or patriotic duty. Now you can spend two hours with the boys from Sunnyvale and it doesn't feel like slumming. So don't say that the Boys have gone Hollywood on us. That's not seeing the big picture. It was probably inevitable Hollywood would colonize Sunnyvale Trailer Park, but as Ricky's dad, Ray, once said, "That's the f---in' way she goes, boys."
Besides, the movie is laugh-out-loud funny, in parts, so by the time the end credits roll, set to a Tragically Hip song (what else?), you'll likely leave feeling satisfied, fan of the show or not.
Related:
All The Drama & Dialogue We'd Expect (Toronto Star)
Trailer Park Boys down & dirty (Toronto Sun)
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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