With the Toronto International Film Festival celebrating its 50th edition this year, it makes sense that a Canadian institution would honor another with its opening evening. And with TIFF who is known for being an audience that turns whose highest award is voted on by paying customers rather than a jury, it made another sense that the film would be about John Candy, the Canadian actor and comedian who was not a people in the first size.
“John Candy: I like me,” which opened the 50th tiff with screenings on thursday night in the Princess of Wales Theater and Roy Thomson Hall, is a Celebratory movie that acknowledges the anxiety and frustration thatsenimes beset the star of sectv and movie liking liksli’s liking. and “uncle buck,” but isn’t terribly interesting in digging for a dark side of the man that virtually everyone describes as being down to earth, generous and mild.
“I wish I had some more bad things to say about him,” says Bill Murray in an interview that opens the film from the actor-friendly director Colin Hanks. “That’s the problem when you talk about John.” He nods at the interviewer outside the camera, probably Hanks. “I hope this thing you do shows people who have some dirt on him.”
Of course, the film does not appear any of that dirt – and it is unlikely that it would appeal to Hanks, who first hit candy when was six or seven and his father, Tom, played with Candy in “Splash.” “John Candy: I Like Me”, named after a line from a speech that Candy gives after Steve Martin’s character lies in him in “Plan, Train,” may well be entitled “John Candy: We Like Him” and rather than seems like a Cop-Out, which seems to be a completely suitable attitude to the beloved actor and canon.
The movie dares to ask the question, “How many nice things can we say about a person before you get tired of hearing them?” And finds that the answer is: “Probably more than you can fit into this movie.”
It is not because Candy is perfect in any way, but he is so inherently approving that you are rooting for him. The TIFF audience did: When Dan Aykroyd called Candy “the sweetest, most generous person each known to me” in a voiceover early in the movie, the audience broke into applause.
And by opening with Candy’s funeral and then highlighting new chapters by having dates on the screen counting back from 1994, the year he died, keeping the film eyes on the central fact that haunted his life: his father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 35, on his son’s fifth birthday and made Candy always aware that his own days can be number. (He survived his father with eight years and dies at the age of 43)
This is Hank’s third documentary after a couple of music -related documents, 2015’s “All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records” and 2017’s “Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (our friends),” About the band that was on stage in Paris’ Bataclan Theater when terrorists killed 90 fans.
Mortality hangs over “John Candy: I Like Me”, but in a much different way. In his family was rarely talked about his father’s premature death, but the silence did not help the young candy to meet the uncomfortable connection between his birthday and his father’s passing. But when he blew out his knee and played football, the shy child was somehow forced himself to perform – where despite his uncertainty he was brilliant, according to colleagues such as Aykroyd, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin and Dave Thomas, all interviewed for the film.
On stage, Thomas, “he looked like a star, he acted like a star,” while off the stage, he pretty much cut the figure: Murray paints a lively picture of his friend’s apartment, complete with a Barcalounger, lime green Shag mats and golden draperies.
But the movie really comes to life with old clips, including the priceless “Yellowbelly” sketch, where Candy played the most cowardly cowboy in the Old West and shot a mother and child in the back because he felt threatened. (Trust me, it plays much more fun than it reads.)
Hollywood came and called the person to Steven Spielberg, who threw candy in his flop from World War II “1941”, but greater roles in better films followed. When John Belushi, another Rotund comedian and actor who came out of skis comedy, died of an overdose of drugs in 1982, Thomas said that a crying candy said to him: “Oh God, it begins.” And when Tom Hanks met him a year later for “Splash,” he said he got a feeling that Candy, when 33, was obsessed with only two years shy for the age that his father had died.
But the 1980s turned out to be a good decade for candy; Despite the constant indignities to be treated differently because of his weight, he had met and developed a reputation for how well he treated fans and friends. (Conan O’Brien tells a wonderful story about inviting candy to Harvard to get a comedy prize and talk to the students and how generous he was with his time.)
There’s a Lengthy Section of Similar Stories and Similar Testimonials About Two-Thirds Of The Way Through The 113-Minute Movie, Which Plays As If it’s a summation of sorts-But Instead of Ending The Film, The Sequence Is Simply a False Ending THAT LEADS IN LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVED THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THAT LEVING THES Including the Nine Movies He Made with John Hughes, Followed by the Increasing Anxiety and Doubt That Kept Into Candy’s Life in the 1990s.
This does not give a dark film-they abundant clips of Candy’s performances always keep things easy and entertaining-but it gives additional shadows into the story, which helps to knock out a loving, kind-hearted portrait. “John Candy: I Like Me”, made with collaboration between Candy’s children and his wife, feels like a story told by friends, but friends who are less interested in marketing idolatry than to show you why they loved the man.
Catherine O’hara gets one of the best last lines when she talks about a dream she had after Candy’s death. The two talked, she said, when she knocked it out, “Why did you have to die?”
John, she said, looked at her and shot back, “Why do you have to pick it up?”
