Revue ‘John Candy: i like me’: affectionate doc from Colin Hanks

John Candy has a little time. While it has been more than three decades that the actor of beloved Canadian bands died tragically too early, at the age of 43, of a heart attack, his heritage continues to burn strongly. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of SplashThe film that really highlighted the career on the big screen of Candy; Next month sees the release of the biography, John Candy: A life in comedywritten by Paul Myers (Mike’s brother); And this week, the Toronto International Film Festival launched its 50th anniversary edition with the premiere of John Candy: I ​​love myself A documentary with a big heart which is as embracing and generous in mind as man himself. It will be launched on Amazon Prime Video from October 10.

Directed by Colin Hanks, and featuring testimonies and reminiscences of those who knew him best – family, friends and colleagues including Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Andrea Martin, Bill Murray and Hanks Tom, who played his brother in the forecast. Splash – The assessment of Candy’s life and inheritance provides a great cause of laughter while causing many tears. Residing just under this relaxed exterior, eager to complain, Everyman outside was chronic anxiety that has reached a paralyzing peak in recent years.

While Hanks traces Candy’s career trajectory of the second stages of the city of Chicago and Toronto at Cult Sketch Series SCTV To serve as a muse by John Hughes in eight collaborations – including Planes, trains and carsfrom which the documentary draws its title, and Uncle Buck – He never loses sight of the lanyard of insecurity that would haunt the actor despite these successes. As O’Brien says, “this industry is very unhealthy for people-plaisir.”

John Franklin Candy, raised in Toronto, was a big shy and introverted child who was every 5 years when his own father died at 35, also from a heart disease. He would gain confidence by making an improvisation and sketch comedy, but it was his character on SCTVIncluding her catches inspired by Pavarotti, Julia Child and Orson Welles, who made people in the industry sit and take note.

Spielberg would call with a room 1941. Mel Brooks, on the big praise, friend Carl Reiner was for Candy after having directed her Summer rentalhas launched it like the half-man and the half-dog barf in Spatial balls. “He stuck to act in his rear pocket and behaved like a human being,” said Brooks of Candy’s professional ethics.

Despite all these good things that came to him, there was always this tenacious underlying current of melancholy. In response to John Belushi’s news (who had tried to persuade his former friend of the second city to join him Saturday Night Live) die of a medication overdose in 1982, SCTV The colleague Dave Thomas remembers tears with a discouraged candy saying: “Oh my God, it starts.” While Thomas developed it, he brought the weight of his father’s death every day.

Ironically, eating and drinking would become Candy’s adaptation mechanism, even if he was aware of his family history. And while his wife pink shares, he often trained with a coach and followed extreme diets, she added that “the industry wanted him big” and his representation was not exactly delighted when he lost almost 100 pounds.

In the early 1990s, when he no longer chose successes – as an interviewer said that does not say it, “you were in more turkeys than a mixture of stuffing” – Candy launched a second career as a co -owner of the owner of the Canadian League for Football Bruce Mcall.

At that time, increasingly plagued by panic crises, he died in his sleep on March 4, 1994, while he was there in Durango, Mexico, spinning unhappy comedy Wagons is.

Hanks – who previously directed a pair of documentaries on the theme of music, including Everything must pass: the rise and the fall of the tower recordings – knows how to give the assembled wealth of comic talents, as well as the widow of Candy and two adult children, all the space they need to share the many living and affecting anecdotes. He accompanies those who have a generous sample of memorable films and television clips, interview with archives and home film sequences, not to mention a coverage of Cynthia Erivo moving “Every time you go Away” by Daryl Hall & John Oates.

What cannot like?