Review: "John Candy: I Like Me"
“Heroes get remembered, but legends never die,” is one of my favorite quotes from The Sandlot (1993). And it definitely comes to mind as I think about the subject of today’s blog: John Candy was both a hero and a legend of a comedy. On October 10th, 2025, Amazon Prime released the documentary John Candy: I Like Me, in commemoration of Candy’s line “I like me. My wife likes me.” From Planes, Trains, & Automobiles (1987).
“John Candy: I Like Me,” depicts how John Candy built his own career, how he met his wife (with whom he collaborated closely), and relationships he had with his close acting friends: Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Tom Hanks, Catherine O’Hara, and many others. There are also nostalgic clips of Candy’s sketches he performed on the Canadian Television Show SCTV (1976-1981), which are hilarious to say the least.
As each interviewee is screened, everyone acknowledges their friendship with the late comedian and how being friends with him made differences in their own careers. Emotions run high for them also as they talk about how talk about their reactions to his passing on March 4th, 1994, at age 43. (The cause of John Candy’s death was a heart attack, which ironically happened to his own father, Sidney James Candy at age of 35.)
In addition to celebrities, the film features interviews with John Candy’s surviving family: daughter, Jennifer, son, Chris, and wife, Rose, with whom he shared a unique closeness. Footage of home movies indicate the family together and his efforts to always do the best he could to take care of all of them. Many of those interviewed also acknowledge that the hardest thing he endured throughout his whole life/career was his own struggle to take care of himself. (Sadly, the family described that John always tried to loose his weight but then bulked himself back up again because the industry “liked him that way.”)
Perhaps most recognizable to many are the films Candy made for the late writer/producer/director and good friend, John Hughes: “Planes, Trains…” Uncle Buck (1989), Home Alone (1990), Only the Lonely (1991), etc. Disney Lovers might also remember John Candy for playing Freddie Bauer (Tom Hanks’s character’s brother) in Splash (1984), or as the voice of Wilbur the Albatross in The Rescuers Down Under (1990), or even as Irving Blitzer, the coach from the bobsled comedy Cool Runnings (1993). Another one of Candy’s most iconic characters was playing Barf the Mog (Half-Man, Half-Dog) in Mel Brooks’s Spacebars (1987).
Amazon’s documentary is guaranteed to make you feel the emotion of John Candy’s hilarious, but tragically short life. But it will also guaranteed to make you have and/or deepen your appreciation for his hysterical contributions to movies.
