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Credit: CBS and AMAZON PRIME VIDEO<\/p>\n
I watched John Candy: I Like Me for the first time on an airplane, and I was prepared to full out bawl at the content. While it did get emotional in moments, Colin Hanks\u2019 documentary mostly gives you a warm picture of a man that lit up the room every time he walked in, a man who had struggles of course, but always wanted to take care of others. There\u2019s a darker version of John Candy, the man that often gets compared to funnymen Chris Farley and John Belushi, who also died too young. But Hanks stands by not going there.<\/p>\n
The documentary director put out I Like Me, a title nodding back to Candy\u2019s iconic Planes, Trains and Automobiles movie, in late 2025. Months later, it\u2019s still making an impact on his fans. Hanks recently admitted there was a more \u201csalacious\u201d version of the Prime Video movie he could have made, but chose not to, mentioning to THR<\/a>:<\/p>\n It\u2019s my job as a filmmaker to not create drama but to show where that drama actually existed and present it in a way that is engaging. Everybody experiences trauma in some shape or form. It doesn\u2019t have to be big-T trauma. But those personality traits \u2014 that gregarious, everybody-come-together energy \u2014 was what made John special. They were also learned coping mechanisms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n John Candy died in 1994, a dozen years after fellow comedian and former SNL star John Belushi died of a drug overdose. Chris Farley, often compared to Candy as another over-the-top comic personality, passed away in 1997 also from a drug overdose. Candy died in his sleep while making the movie Wagons East! He famously wasn\u2019t taking good care of himself at the time, but it wasn\u2019t drugs that took him from his friends and family.<\/p>\n People make parallels between the three men because they were all taken from us too young. They were all funny, and that comedy masked some pain. John Candy\u2019s story was different, though, and he\u2019d made such an impression on Colin Hanks<\/a> at a young age, the director wanted his movie to allow that version of Candy to be the lasting one.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Hanks he made an impression on either. There\u2019s the great advice he gave Mike Myers<\/a> about getting into comedy. There\u2019s the time he got real with Conan O\u2019Brien about <\/a>doing comedy. There\u2019s the lovely way he looked out for Macaulay Culkin<\/a> when his own dad wasn\u2019t on the set of Uncle Buck. Everyone who knew John has a story about him like this.<\/p>\n The darkest I feel the documentary gets<\/a> has to do with career choices Candy made, both about keeping up weight for Hollywood roles, but also saying \u201cyes\u201d to too many people that maybe took for granted that willingness to say \u201cyes.\u201d Hanks said he saw Candy as a person as an \u201ceveryman.\u201d He wanted the documentary to be relatable. The end result is a mesmerizing watch that certainly encapsulates the impression the actor made on others.<\/p>\n If you haven\u2019t given it a watch yet, it\u2019s worth checking out with your Amazon Prime subscription<\/a>. Spaceballs 2 is also coming without him, but his castmates have done a lot to reassure us Josh Gad is pulling from the right place<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit:…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":844113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[272096,110673,171,8105,111012,53,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-844112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-chris-farley","tag-colin-hanks","tag-entertainment","tag-john-belushi","tag-john-candy","tag-movies","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116692618086085918","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n