‘John Sweet: I Like Me’ Assessment: Colin Hanks’ Affectionate Doc

John Sweet is having a little bit of a second. Whereas it has been greater than three a long time for the reason that beloved Canadian comedian actor died tragically too quickly, on the age of 43, of a coronary heart assault, his legacy continues to burn brightly. Final 12 months marked the fortieth anniversary of Splash, the movie that basically jump-started Sweet’s large display screen profession; subsequent month sees the discharge of the biography, John Sweet: A Life in Comedy, penned by Paul Myers (brother of Mike); and this week the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition kicked off its fiftieth anniversary version with the premiere of John Sweet: I Like Me, a big-hearted documentary that’s as embracing and beneficiant of spirit as the person himself. It launches on Amazon Prime Video beginning October 10.

Directed by Colin Hanks, and that includes testimonials and reminiscences from those that knew him greatest — household, pals and colleagues together with Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Brief, Steve Martin, Andrea Martin, Invoice Murray and Hanks’ dad Tom, who performed his brother within the aforementioned Splash — the evaluation of Sweet’s life and legacy gives ample trigger for laughter whereas additionally upsetting loads of tears. Residing simply beneath that easygoing, eager-to-please, everyman exterior was a power nervousness that reached a crippling peak throughout his closing years.

As Hanks charts Sweet’s profession trajectory from the Second Metropolis levels in Chicago and Toronto to cult sketch sequence SCTV to serving as John Hughes’ muse in eight collaborations — together with Planes, Trains, and Vehicles, from which the documentary derives its title, and Uncle Buck — he by no means loses sight of that nagging undercurrent of insecurity that may hang-out the actor regardless of these successes. As O’Brien places it, “This business may be very unhealthy for people-pleasers.”

Toronto-raised John Franklin Sweet was a shy, introverted large child who was all of 5 years outdated when his personal father died at age 35, additionally from coronary heart illness. He’d achieve confidence performing improv and sketch comedy, however it was his character work on SCTV, together with his impressed takes on Pavarotti, Julia Youngster and Orson Welles, that made business folks sit up and take discover.

Spielberg would come calling with an element in 1941. Mel Brooks, on the excessive reward pal Carl Reiner had for Sweet after directing him in Summer season Rental, proceeded to solid him because the half-man, half-dog Barf in Spaceballs. “He caught performing in his again pocket and behaved like a human being,” says Brooks of Sweet’s skilled ethic.

Regardless of all that great things coming his method, there was nonetheless that cussed undercurrent of melancholy. In response to information of John Belushi (who had tried to steer his outdated Second Metropolis buddy to hitch him on Saturday Evening Stay) dying of a drug overdose in 1982, SCTV colleague Dave Thomas tearfully recollects a despondent Sweet saying, “Oh God, it’s beginning.” As Thomas elaborates, he carried the load of his father’s passing daily.

Paradoxically, consuming and ingesting would turn into Sweet’s coping mechanism, at the same time as he was conscious of his household historical past. And whereas his spouse Rose shares he would usually work out with a coach and go on excessive diets, she provides that “the business wished him large” and his illustration wasn’t precisely thrilled when he as soon as shed near 100 kilos.

By the early ’90s, when he was now not choosing the hits — as one interviewer not-so-gingerly places it, “You’ve been in additional turkeys than a stuffing combine” — Sweet launched into a second profession as co-owner of the Canadian Soccer League’s Toronto Argonauts, together with Wayne Gretzky and Los Angeles Kings proprietor Bruce McNall.

By then more and more suffering from panic assaults, he’d die in his sleep on March 4, 1994, whereas on location in Durango, Mexico, filming the ill-fated comedy Wagons East.

Hanks — who beforehand directed a pair of music-themed documentaries, together with All Issues Should Cross: The Rise and Fall of Tower Information — is aware of to offer the assembled wealth of comedic expertise, together with Sweet’s widow and two grownup youngsters, all of the house they should share the various vigorous and affecting anecdotes. He accompanies these with a beneficiant sampling of memorable film and TV clips, archival interview and residential film footage, to not point out a stirring Cynthia Erivo cowl of “Each Time You Go Away” by Daryl Corridor & John Oates.

What’s to not like?