COCKSURE PAYS A CALL
Two Lads visit Kanata
With their popcorn, soft drinks and boy-next-door good looks, Edward Hillier and Luke Marty could have been a couple of Kanata bros catching a mid-week movie.
Of course, as two of the principal actors in The Cocksure Lads Movie, the new Canadian indie film from writer-director-musician Murray Foster, which was having a pre-release screening at Landmark Cinemas in Kanata Wednesday night, Hillier and Marty were anything but two local boys.
The duo — charming, seemingly a tad nervous about potential reception of the film — introduced the movie, as did others associated with it in a dozen-plus movie theatres from Ontario to British Columbia the same night. They then plunked themselves down with the small but eager audience of 20 (“We’re old, old, old Murray Foster fans!” announced one audience member during the introduction) to watch the musical comedy about a fictional Britpop band arriving in present-day Toronto to play its first-ever North American gig.
As Hillier said in the post-screening Q&A with audience members, the band is at “a tipping point” where it has a following in Britain and glimpses international success on the horizon.
The band is also ripe for disaster. It comes in that classic rock ’n’ roll form: a blow-up over money and ego.
Frontman Dusty (Lyndon Ogbourne), a likable but arrogant type, figures he should be getting more than a quarter of the proceeds because he’s the most important member of the band. He announces this the day they land in Canada, which Dusty, dreams of mass audiences in his geographically muddled head, keeps calling “America.” The other band members — bassist Derek (Marty), drummer Blake (Hillier) and lead guitarist Reg (Adam McNab) — tell him to stuff it, and everyone storms off, the band apparently in tatters. The film then tracks the exploits, including adventures with young ladies, of each band member over the course of the day, leaving us and Cocksure Lads fans wondering if they’ll reunite in time for their much-anticipated show.
It’s a thin if serviceable plot device that allows Foster, himself a member of Newfoundland’s folk rockers Great Big Sea and cofounder of Ontario’s now-defunct Moxy Früvous, to explore what it means to be in a band and to peek into the nature of friendship and the vagaries of human nature, especially that of young, restless musicians.
Murray has cast some wellknown faces in small roles, including Canadian rockers Walk Off The Earth as a listless indie band called The Black Flames and Great Big Sea’s Alan Doyle as a seen-it-all bartender. “Alan makes it a point to always be the funniest on the set between scenes,” said Hillier in the Q&A.
Not above predictability and never managing to soar from just entertaining to riveting, the film also follows each band member through an epiphany.
Despite the self-absorption of most of the band members (Derek, a tough guy with the heart of a marshmallow, is the exception), Foster and company do capture the innocence and optimism of both the band and, for those of us who remember it, the 1960s.
It’s also quintessentially Canadian, according to Marty. In a pre-screening interview he said, “Murray ’s sense of humour is very Canadian. It’s not poking fun at anything; it’s having fun with it.”
Funded by Telefilm Canada with some extra money from CBC-TV’s Dragons’ Den, the film grew out of the real-life band The Cocksure Lads led by Foster and his former Moxy Früvous bandmate Mike Ford (former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi was also in Moxy Früvous). Foster and Ford had written a bunch of British Invasion-style tunes over the years, and about four years ago, the songs began to coalesce into a backstory about a fictional British band. That became the film in which Ford shares credit with Foster for the songwriting.
The movie, which went into production last year, has won awards at both the Tenerife International Film Festival in Spain and the Niagara Integrated Film Festival. It opens at selected Landmark Cinemas including Kanata and elsewhere on Aug. 7 with possible wider distribution in the future.
On Wednesday, Lyne Mercier, who had travelled from Montreal for the screening, told Hillier and Marty during the Q&A that she thought the two were “absolutely hilarious” in the film. She later told the Citizen that she was a longtime fan of Great Big Sea and an advocate of independent film.
“I think (indie film) is fantastic. These people are working to make people happy, not to make money. To me, it’s important to support them,” Mercier said.