Men With Brooms was a riot. I highly recommend it. If you do not have a sense of humour, or have qualms about your Canadian identity, do not see it. You won’t get it.

The credits faded in and out on the black screen. There was a loon call. I murmured to my seat-mates, “Well, I know I�m in a Canadian movie — there’s a loon crying.”

Then the deep patriotic male chorus started singing about the land of the silver bush to visuals of rushing water and wind through the trees, and the hoarse calls of beaver and the wail of a bagpipe. If the audience hadn’t known by the loon that it was a Canadian movie, they had to have figured it out by then. Not that it mattered; I was crying with laughter already.

Only our row was laughing in the whole theatre. We must have all been curlers or something. Or patriotic. With a wicked sense of humour.

CURRENT READING:

Well, Men With Brooms, actually, because I had to buy something that wasn’t a fashion magazine at the tiny bookstore near Zellers while I was waiting for my husband to come back and pick me up from my haircut (took him over an hour). Contains a couple of scenes cut from the movie that explain later scenes, and classic descriptions of Canada like, “an endless stretch of blacktop heading deeper and deeper into a land that comprised nothing but rocks, trees, lakes, rocks, trees, lakes, rocks, oops there’s a moose, trees, lakes, rocks and more rocks.” (p.196) And then there’s the opening paragraph, which goes like this:

“Once upon a time, there was a very cold country full of rocks. One particular province of this country, known as the Province of Ontario in the Dominion of Canada, was simply chock full of cold and rocks. The rocks, being rocks, didn’t mind the cold. They just carried on, being rocks, until someone (an immigrant from a not-quite-so-cold but just as full of rocks place called Scotland) disturbed their peace.

“Canada has never been quite the same.” (p.1)