3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): John Candy: I Like Me

2025, Colin Hanks (All Things Must Pass) -- Amazon 

Full disclosure: 1) I was never the biggest John Candy fan, but I have seen a lot of his movies and 2) I am not a great viewer of documentaries, but Marmy is a fan of Candy, so we watched together.

It was fine, but perhaps I am not the best judge.

For those not in the loop, John Candy was a beloved (and even I, not the biggest fan, knew that) comedic actor from Toronto who passed away too early due to weight & stress related health issues, at the age of 43. The documentary covers his youth, the start of his career, its rise, and with the rise, the rise of the demands on him. It is obviously a movie made by people who loved him and his legacy, but it does not shy away from the dark aspects of his life & choices. That said, given the darkness emanating from the US at the moment, Candy was angel by compare.

Documentaries follow formats, always dodging between stock footage and interviews with people. Nobody interviewed didn't love John Candy and the expected SCTV and Saturday Night Live crew are there, along with Hanks' dad Tom - I was not aware of their connection beyond the single movie they did together. but Tom seemed to adore John.

The problem I have with documentaries, which is the same I always had with journalistic media, and even more so with everything we read on the Internet now, is that its all about the creator's agenda. We are being manipulated by the techniques of film making into taking everything we see on the screen, edited entirely for the script of what needs to be said, as bold fact. For me, successful documentaries unfold facts and then let you make decisions, but this is not that -- this is about idolizing a man, but admittedly, not assuming he was perfect.

If there was one aspect of the purposeful editing in the movie that entirely sucked me in, it was the number of times the movie chose a shot of Candy being vulnerable. He's seen as a big laughable bear, keyword "big" and that focus hurt him. The script says it, but you also see it in his face and hear it in his voice from interview snippets and it was almost as if the entire documentary was built around a need to remind us of this aspect his personality. His feelings could be easily hurt, and because he was big and he was a comedian, people felt it was alright to poke at him for it. They wanted to deflate the jolly. And that was wrong.

But, he stood up for himself, as his character in Planes, Trains & Automobiles did, giving the documentary its title. I think I would like him as well.