Roger Ebert on John Candy, and on John Hughes’ second-best movie:

One night a few years after “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” was released, I came upon John Candy (1950-1994) sitting all by himself in a hotel bar in New York, smoking and drinking, and we talked for a while. We were going to be on the same TV show the next day. He was depressed. People loved him, but he didn’t seem to know that, or it wasn’t enough. He was a sweet guy and nobody had a word to say against him, but he was down on himself. All he wanted to do was make people laugh, but sometimes he tried too hard, and he hated himself for doing that in some of his movies. I thought of Del. There is so much truth in the role that it transforms the whole movie. Hughes knew it … And Steve Martin knew it, and played straight to it.

The movies that last, the ones we return to, don’t always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart. When Neal unleashes that tirade in the motel room and Del’s face saddens, he says, “Oh. I see.” It is a moment that not only defines Del’s life, but is a turning point in Neal’s, because he also is a lonely soul, and too well organized to know it. Strange, how much poignancy creeps into this comedy, and only becomes stronger while we’re laughing.

See also Colby Cosh’s terrific column in today’s National Post.

(Photo by Flickr user guil3433)

In the past decade or so, as they replaced all the old cinemas I loved with technically superior but sterile and placeless mallscapes, and then doubled, and then tripled the prices, I have fallen out of love with movie-going. Look, for the love of Christ, at what they’ve done to the Loew’s on Ste-Catherine Street (above). It makes me want to put my fist through something. So it now takes the promise of something extraordinary to get me out. But I’ll read Roger Ebert any day of the week, not just for his impeccable taste in film but for passages like this, in his review of Revolutionary Road:

[Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet] are so good, they stop being actors and become the people I grew up around. Don’t think they smoke too much in this movie. In the 1950s everybody smoked everywhere all the time. Life was a disease, and smoking held it temporarily in remission.

Yowzah. On the one hand, I’d love to read more about his thoughts on the 50s. On the other, I’m kind of frightened.