Once again, this past week has been far too busy to see the films I’d love to spend time watching. This current week promises to be more of the same. Aah, maybe Labor Day weekend will help. We shall see. In the meantime, I have one documentary to share with you. Maybe you checked it out during its debut last weekend on a cable network, but if not, here’s the lowdown before you see it. As always, thanks for reading. ~ Chris K.
(click on images to enlarge on the screen!)
Documentary (2019)
Lisa Niemi, Jennifer Grey, Lori Petty, Rob Lowe, Sam Elliot, Don Swayze, Demi Moore, Kelly Lynch, C. Thomas Howell
I didn’t know about the release of this documentary until I spotted it trending on Twitter and all of my Facebook friends were talking about it over the weekend. I made a point of first determining whether or not we had the Paramount network on our cable package (which I came to find out surprisingly we do!) and I set up the DVR immediately to catch it this week. I watch mostly documentaries lately and a number of them are about favorite performers whether they are musicians, actors or comedians, directors and authors — those are the usual suspects. For me personally, Patrick Swayze was not an actor that drew me to a film but I often found him in work that attracted me to it. And once I was engrossed with the film, I usually enjoyed his performance in it. I am not a huge DIRTY DANCING fan, though my college roommate definitely was, and over time, I’ve found some affection for it. The soundtrack is phenomenal, of course. I adore the S.E. Hinton novel The Outsiders and enjoy many Francis Ford Coppola films, but found his cinematic take on it sooooooo overblown and overacted, that I like very few performances in that film, so any criticism I may have pointed out about Swayze in that picture was not isolated. I thought everybody sucked in that film! And there were plenty of other films that he would pop into that didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But then I saw GHOST, and everything changed for me and my perception of him as an actor. I truly love that film, everything about it, and the performances by the two leads and a stellar supporting cast of good guys and secretly evil hidden enemies blew me away.
When I sat down to watch this documentary, I was able to be the objective viewer because after all, there was really only one film that stayed with me above all others. But what this discussion of Swayze – the man, the dancer and the actor – reminded me was that whenever I saw interviews with him, I was always struck with his sincerity and candor. I always appreciated that when I watched him answer a tough question, I knew he was answering it from the heart, and that definitely is captured throughout this documentary. It attempts to show the various layers of how the actor became the man he grew up to be through his tough training under his mom’s tutelage as a dance teacher, through major accidents and a form of psychological abuse he underwent as a young man and how that early relationship shaped him as a professional, as a husband and as a peer on the set. I AM PATRICK SWAYZE is never dull, always fascinating to see who has a personal story or observation to share, and this one definitely offers an impressive list of co-stars, media personalities and family members who have much to share on Swayze who defied the odds and continued working through pancreatic cancer treatment, one more demonstration of his tireless work ethic.
I think most movie fans and certainly fellow 80s tweens and teens like me will appreciate the film’s nostalgic look at the evolution of a movie star caught up in the constraints of his own persona and his attempts to try to break down those walls that Hollywood used to confine him to a specific movie genre or stereotype character. I see get the whole story from the people who knew him best. This one’s worth viewing.
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