TIFF

Christmas folly

Cracking wise with the makers of the Canadian indie comedy Cooper's Camera

Last Updated: Saturday, September 13, 2008 | 11:49 AM ET

By Katrina Onstad, CBC News

Mike Beaver plays a dinner guest from hell as a family's 1985 Christmas celebration is caught on video in the comedy Cooper's Camera. (TIFF)

It was Dave Foley’s penis that got the biggest laugh. (Surely that’s not always the case.) The morning after the red carpet Toronto International Film Festival premiere of their half-obscene Christmas jeer movie Cooper’s Camera, star Jason Jones and director Warren Sonoda drink coffee and debrief.

“The penis joke was weird, because it was only on for a split second. There was a gasp, and then the audience laughed so hard they missed the next joke. We were relieved. We wondered: ‘Are they going to see it?’ ” Sonoda says.

“We like to flatter Dave and say: ‘It’s a very large cameo,’” Jones adds.

The two 35-year-olds from Hamilton, Ont., will be success stories at their next high school reunion. New York-based Jones is a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he is an expert at underlining the stupidity in American news with baritone authority. Sonoda, who makes videos and commercials in Toronto, grabbed attention in 2004 as an indie director with his DIY mockumentary Ham & Cheese (also co-written by and starring Jones).

Cooper’s Camera has the hang-time feel of a group of funny friends cracking each other up, with their shenanigans caught, almost accidentally, on film. Set in a suburban 1985 that will be cringingly recognizable to those in their 30s — fingerless gloves, crimped hair, Tootie jokes — the film has Jones playing Gord Cooper, a clueless dad in a reindeer sweater whose estranged brother (Peter Keleghan) shows up for a disastrous Christmas dinner. Samantha Bee — another Canadian-born Daily Show correspondent and Jones’s wife — is the third point of a creepy love triangle that spurs a havoc-filled holiday, replete with a drunken topless (male) tobogganing competition and bad presents (Nana gets a watermelon).

Jones wrote the script with a fellow Toronto comedian, Mike Beaver, after Beaver made him suffer through his family's home videos years ago when they were acting students at Ryerson University.

Cooper family members, clockwise from left, Marcus (Nick McKinlay), Gord (Jason Jones), Nancy (Samantha Bee) and Teddy (Dylan). (TIFF)

“We were just that bored,” Jones says. “The tapes were awful, but every now and then, a little gem of a moment would come out. When we started writing together, it was: ‘You know what would be great? If we pieced together all our family moments and did a Blair Witch on them.’ ”

The movie that eventually resulted appears to have been “shot” by Gord’s 11-year-old son, who records the family’s disintegration on an old VHS camcorder the size of a Smartcar. (Foley, of Kids in the Hall fame, is the original owner of the video camera.) The film’s quick-and-dirty 11-day shoot happened outside Toronto last February while Jones and Bee were on hiatus from The Daily Show. When Sonoda walked in to the set-decorated suburban Toronto house where they shot, he felt like he’d gone through a rabbit hole back to his youth.

“Every generation has their magic period. We’re getting older, and suddenly there’s this nostalgia for the ’80s and ’80s comedies,” he says. To get the look right, the two visited Jones’s parents’ house and raided their closets the night before shooting began.

“I asked my mom, ‘Why do you have this gigantic ’80s microwave that a) doesn’t work and b) if it did, you can’t look into it?’” Jones laughs. “She was like, ‘I’ve been thinking of getting rid of it. I’m making a list of things to get rid of.’”

In the film, the gags are relentless and expected, but what’s more surprising is watching Jones and Bee, so identified with their Daily Show personae, spread their wings as performers. Jones’s Gord is yet another in a long line of loser dads in pop culture, but infused with a surprising tenderness.

“I see a bit of your dad in there,” Sonoda says to Jones.

“[Gord]’s the quintessential doofus dad. There’s a little Homer Simpson. Chevy Chase played it brilliantly,” Jones says. “It’s everyone’s bumbling dad, who wants to do the right thing but doesn’t have the skills to do it.”

Jones and Bee are parents themselves, to a three-month-old boy and a 2-year-old daughter. The whole family recently travelled to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, rushing to Toronto for the film festival after John McCain’s acceptance speech.

Nancy Cooper (Samantha Bee, left) and Aunt Bev (Jen Baxter) share a pensive moment. (TIFF)

“At the DNC, we were rock stars. At the RNC, we were ghosts,” Jones says. “You’d think if you follow politics, you might know who Jon Stewart is, but it was amazing how many Republicans were like, ‘I’m sorry? The Daily Show? Is that a show that’s daily?’ ”

When I spoke to Bee earlier this year, she talked about Camera as a hint of the kind of future the couple would like to have post-Daily Show (though both are adamant that they never want to leave), one in which they bring original projects to life rather than wait for the next sitcom. “I don’t think either of us wants to feel at the mercy of casting directors. We want to be free of those shadows, and call the shots to a certain extent,” Bee said. “Cooper’s Camera is part of that idea.”

While the film appears to fit nicely into the hoser comedy tradition of Canadian film – a little FUBAR, a little Strange Brew – it’s actually set near Buffalo, for reasons Jones is unabashed about.

“We want to make an international sale. You make a movie for people to watch, not to show once at a film festival and never see again. I think if we can get one-third of the people who watch The Daily Show to see this movie, we’ve got a big hit on our hands. It’s such a Canadian thing to pretend the commercial side doesn’t matter.”

Adds Sonoda: “We want it to be shown on television at Christmas every year, the way you go back to Christmas Vacation or Christmas Story. We wanted to commit to film the most atrocious family holiday you could ever imagine, and I think we’ve done it.”

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBC.ca.