John Candy – Page 3 – Through the Shattered Lens

Don (John Candy)

Before I talk about the film, I need to make some apologies:

1. I apologize to Bobcat Goldthwait for reminding people that this movie exists.
2. I apologize to everyone for reminding them that Bobcat Goldthwait once had starring roles in movies. From what I can gather from IMDb, he did the Sofia Coppola and now works behind the camera. His movies seem to get decent reviews too.
3. I’d like to apologize to anyone involved in the production of the Francis movies.

This is about a moron who came across a movie about a talking horse that had bad ratings on IMDb, then discovered it was available for streaming and thought it would be funny to watch. Oh, wait, that’s my story. The movie is about a moron whose mother dies and leaves him a talking horse. This moron named Fred P. Chaney (Bobcat Goldthwait) works at a stockbroker firm. The firm is run by Walter Sawyer (Dabney Coleman) who really needs some dental work.

Walter Sawyer (Dabney Coleman)

Let’s apologize to Dabney Coleman while we are here too. Anyways, Sawyer offers to buy the talking horse whose name is Don and is voiced by John Candy. Apologies to John Candy…and horses. This movie really is a blatant ripoff of those movies from the 1950’s about a smart ass talking mule named Francis and his buddy played by Donald O’Connor. Except those are kind of funny. This is painful.

That’s a blow up horse sex doll by the way. Getting ahead of myself. After acquiring Don, Chaney is introduced to Don’s family. Apparently, Don’s Mom is curious what it’s like to be facing someone while having sex with them. I say it a lot, but no joke, that happens in this movie. We return to the brokerage firm and Don calls Chaney with a hot tip. Of course it pans out and now Chaney has some dough. This is where another set of apologies needs to be issued:

1. I apologize to Little Richard that Tutti Frutti is used in the movie.
2. I apologize to The Replacements that their song Shooting Dirty Pool is in this movie.
3. I apologize to the Beastie Boys that their song (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) is in here too. We now know that the Beastie Boys also divorced themselves from their first album because it was featured in Hot to Trot.

Oh, and Virginia Madsen is in this for some sort of love interest, but when horses are saying things like “Eat shit and die!” you can’t bring yourself to care about it. Don’t believe me that one of the horses says that? Here you go!

The meat of the movie basically goes like this. Chaney gets into some zany situations like hanging from the side of a building while a dove tries to do him in. Sawyer and his friend try and figure out how they can also make money using whatever secret Chaney seems to have discovered. Don has a house party with a dog, a cat, a bird, and probably some other animals. It all comes down to a horse race that Don needs to win with Chaney as the jockey. A stock deal goes south for Chaney and this is some sort of final showdown between him and Sawyer.

Oh, I forgot, Don’s Dad dies. Presumedly because they had already made an animatronic horsefly and needed to have some excuse to use it. Don’s Dad is reincarnated as it.

Of course Don and Chaney win the race. They do it by having Don say things to the other horses. He tells one horse that the winners are being turned into glue. He tells another one, who I guess is Spanish, that immigration is here. The jokes are so awful in this movie. And just for one final cherry on top of this dung heap, we get a short appearance by Gilbert Gottfried. Why? Because Don wants a diamond on his tooth like that bad guy in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) and Gottfried is the dentist.

Straight From The Horses Mouth

The one good thing about this movie is that I don’t even need to put in a final verdict sentence. The movie does it for me.

I have mixed feelings about the 1995 films Canadian Bacon.

On the one hand, Canadian Bacon is the only non-documentary to have been directed by Michael Moore. And I’m just going to admit right now that I don’t care much for Michael Moore. I think he’s fake. I think he’s the epitome of the type of limousine liberal who exclusively preaches to the converted and who, when all is said and done, does more harm to his causes than good. Just because he doesn’t shave, dresses like a slob, and apparently has never been to a gym, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s worth $50 million dollars. Just because he may claim to be for the workers, that doesn’t keep him from notoriously overworking and underpaying his own employees. Just because he may make films critical of capitalism, that certainly hasn’t stopped him from investing millions in the very same companies that he claims to oppose. And, quite frankly, it’s hard for me to take seriously a man who rails against income inequality when that man happens to own 9 mansions, none of which are exactly housing the homeless right now.

On the other hand, I love Canada! Canada has produced some of my favorite actors. It’s the country that created Degrassi. It’s the home of Lindsay Dianne and the Becoming A Bolder Being blog! Seriously, how can you not love Canada?

In fact, if a war ever broke out between American and Canada, I’m not sure who I’d support. Then again, hopefully Texas will have seceded from the U.S.A. before that happens. I’m keeping fingers crossed about that. Hopefully, once we have seceded, our first action will be to declare war on Vermont. (Not the rest of America, though. Just Vermont.)

The plot of Canadian Bacon is that the President of the United States (Alan Alda) is suffering from low approval ratings so he decides that America needs to find a new country to be enemies with. Mind you, the President doesn’t necessarily want to go to war. Instead, he just wants to have an enemy that he can always be on the verge of going to war with. After a riot breaks out at a hockey game, the President’s advisors realize that Canada would be the perfect enemy!

(And, while this is played for laughs, there actually is a historical precedent here. The War of 1812 was basically a result of America’s desire to conquer Canada.)

Anyway, American airwaves are soon full of anti-Canada propaganda and, since Michael Moore thinks everyone in America is an idiot except for him, gun-toting rednecks are soon preparing to do whatever it takes to defend America. A patriotic sheriff named Boomer (John Candy) decides to invade Canada on his own. Needless to say, things get even more complicated from there and soon a crazy weapons manufacturer (G.D. Spradlin) is plotting to launch a missile attack on Russia and … oh, who cares?

When Canadian Bacon tries to satirize politics and blind patriotism, it falls flat. Michael Moore has somehow earned a reputation for being a satirist but, if you actually look at his work, it quickly becomes apparent that he really doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. The humor in his documentaries is pretty much based on Moore saying, “Look how stupid everyone is except for me!” Since the people who watch Michael Moore documentaries are usually people who already agree with Michael Moore, they naturally find that to be hilarious because they already think anyone who disagrees with them is a joke. However, that doesn’t mean that Moore himself is a comic genius. He’s just a guy telling a joke to an audience that already knows the punchline.

Canadian Bacon is long on righteous indignation but it’s short on anything that would make you want to spend 90 minutes listening to the same point being made over and over again. Moore did make one good decision, in that he selected Rip Torn to play a crazed general. Rip Torn can deliver militaristic insults with the best of them.

The few times that Canadian Bacon actually works is when it gently (as opposed to indignantly) satirizes Canada’s reputation for being the most polite (and most hockey-obsessed) place on Earth. Dan Aykroyd has a great cameo as a Canadian police officer who pulls over Boomer’s truck and politely reprimands him for not including French translations for all of the anti-Canadian graffiti on the side of the vehicle.

Canadian Bacon could have used more scenes like that.