His farewell bow One of the strangest directorial debuts. Yes, actors shoot very bad tapes because they only see the top layer of the entire filming process. Someone, like Eastwood, still wins a place on the director's Olympus (even at the expense of the good topics he raises), someone better not take up the camera. Just in the wake of revisiting Ackroyd's creepiest single film, I was drawn to old comedies. And so, having stumbled upon another comedy with John Candy (all of them I watch exclusively for the sake of acting), I suddenly found that John himself directed it.
I don’t know if he was able to attend the editing, as he died the same year on the set of Caravan East. But I'm still confused. I usually know how to recognize what the author wanted to say and criticize if the thought could not be conveyed. Here... I don’t know what John Candy wanted to say. It's a comedy. But it's the saddest comedy you've ever seen. The fact that one of the writers died during the work may have left its mark on the film, but in any case, even without knowing that the director will soon be gone, you will still be persecuted by the idea that the author is saying goodbye to you, although how could forty-three-year-old Candy have such thoughts?
The owner of a small copying center Warren Quay dreams of going to the land of his dreams - Alaska, where his first childhood love once went. However, his wife is only busy milking his money, draughts with a contractor and stealing Warren’s funds set aside to fulfill his dreams. Warren is forty-one years old and his own reflection, appearing in the toaster and in the microwave oven, accuses him of having lived life. And when he meets his first love, Diana, who is now disabled, he decides to take himself hostage in order to return the money stolen by his wife. There will be racing cars, and real Russian mafiosi (in a small role himself Candy, portraying the Russian gangster Yuri Petrovich), and Alaska.
And I keep wondering what it was. Melancholy backgrounds, the fall of life, the silence of Alaska, the police slowly dance or play classics to the blues from the radio while holding the cordon. Yeah, it's eccentric. But the eccentricity of sad clowns. Everyone in the movie is an idiot, but something that fits into everyday life, like a sheriff negotiating, constantly stopping to eat. I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end it turned out that none of this was happening, that poor Warren just blew his brains out, realizing that the opportunity for happiness went away with his youth.
You can guess some of the tricks that Candy took from Columbus when he worked with him in “Only the Lonely Will Understand”, but for all the fact that it is completely uncharacteristic not only for comedies of the 80s and 90s, but also for eccentric comedies in general, Candy pressed with all his strength exclusively on the lyrical component. And it's beautiful. Sad. But beautiful. His walk with his disabled lover to the places of childhood, a gift from a friend who took him on a two-hour hike in the woods (like, not Alaska, but close).
Jokes aren't funny. Not because they are bad, but because they are strange. The actors are brilliant. But it makes the jokes even stranger, like the moment Warren’s wife and her friend try to remember what they saw when they spoke to Warren as a “hostage” and carried some strange game. Or the joke “don’t know where to go and bump into each other” – old as sawdust in the head, but does not play because it is too slow, too close to reality, not to clowning. All right, I scolded the joke “Look, Boris Yeltsin!” From surprise)
Beautiful sight. Not funny, it's weird. It was like looking into the soul of a comedian and realizing that he never laughed, that his shoulders were shaking because he was crying all this time.