Director: Marina Zenovich
Cast: Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Beverly D’Angelo, Goldie Hawn
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Might have made a point of seeing it when everybody else did, but I cut the cord like an idiot and had to wait for a month for it to show up on Max.
Did I Like It: It’s easy to make a hatchet job out of anything related to Chase. He’s eagerly pissed people off for years, and there’s probably somebody out there who hasn’t yet learned that he is often difficult.
I’m not prepared to say the film goes deeper than that, as Chase does occasionally come off as sympathetically broken, but he also never seems unaware that he is being watched. He deals out his prickliness in carefully measured doses. It feels believable, but manageably believable.
Here’s the real problem I have with the whole affair. In the section of the film on Community and his eventual firing, it is depicted as if Dan Harmon—creator of the show—wrote a bit of about Chase’s character doing a Black-face Señor Wences ventriloquism act, that was only made worse by the character’s asian (read: yellow-face) wife, played by Chase’s left hand, and that was the incident which led to him saying things which necessitated likely half-hearted apologies and leaks to the Hollywood Reporter. It also indicates that after the fight between Harmon and Chase occurred, Chase still insisted that Harmon continue to run the show.
Not true.
Harmon was fired after the fight—to my knowledge, it’s never been confirmed that his firing was due to the Chase problem, but it might have been—Chase continued with the show into season 4, and the incident occurred during the production of that season, without the involvement of Harmon. If the filmmakers and interviewees got that wrong—or, worse yet, fudged the timeline through intention or expediency—then I can’t help but wonder what else they got wrong.
This is all to say that I would really like a Community movie as soon as possible. Please and thank you.