I Am Chris Farley

Within the first five minutes of I Am Chris Farley, you will be overcome with the sense of loss and grief. We go back to when Chris was just a child and see his siblings talking about their departed brother, and the loss of a beloved family member becomes instantaneously too real. You will laugh, a lot, you will cry, a lot, but most of all you will miss him, a lot.

I Am Chris Farley is a documentary told with love and respect for the person, not a glorifyingly tacky exploration of demons (a la an E! True Hollywood Story episode). It celebrates Farley, his warm and tender nature and natural ability to touch our funny bones. And while it must touch upon the factors that resulted in his death, those minor notes are not the point of the documentary.

Instead, I Am Chris Farley does a wonderful job of highlighting the man. Taking time to focus on little gems in his personality and comedic habits, bringing them full circle - showing that perhaps Farley never deviated much from that sensitive kid from Wisconsin who wanted to be liked. Some people may criticize the film for glossing over the darker components of his life; however, any audience member with a semblance of empathy will be able to infer the cause of death, without needing the documentary to explicitly go into the sordid details.

To be frank, I don't know how the directors, Brent Hodge and Derik Murray, were able to sway so many individuals to participate in this film, but I am incredibly happy that they did. With seemingly no connection to Center City, SNL, Wisconsin or any of the comedic actors involved in this documentary, they were able garner the approval of Farley's friends and family and tell the quintessential Chris Farley story. Hodge and Murray are able to capture the magic that was Farley in this narrative, and convey the love and talent of the man.

I Am Chris Farley starts with his family and up bringing in Madison Wisconsin, told through anecdotes from his brothers that will have you chuckling and saying to yourself "yup, that sounds like Chris." Though, like most people, you never had the opportunity to meet the energetically larger than life individual, and your only perception of him is through a screen. From there, we follow Chris to college and get a more comprehensive view of the man and how he came to pursue comedy as a profession. Onward to Chicago, then New York, then Hollywood and then...

In the hour and half documentary, you will feel as though you too knew and were able to call Chris Farley a friend. And the end of I Am Chris Farley will hurt, and though you know he wouldn't want you to cry, you just won't be able to stop yourself.

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7 out of 10 may seem like a good rating for I Am Chris Farley, and on the whole this is a documentary worth watching, primarily for those who have seen Farley's work back in the 90's (I want to see more of the perspective of someone who isn't a fan, or was too young to see the impact at the time). And for myself the work of this man has resonance from a specific time; as an adolescent, Farley came at just the right time in my life via his work on SNL and movies like Tommy Boy and Coneheads, and I even found as an overweight kid that he was kind of an odd role model.

Here was a guy acting like a silly fool on TV and in movies, but in the roles he was committed completely, without any equivocation, while also having a pure, kind spirit about how he related to other actors and characters: a man-child in a way that wasn't stupid in an obnoxious way (a danger with comedian stars today). Among the sort of BIG comedic stars of his time he went even BIGGER than someone like Belushi (maybe slightly less, uh, nuanced if that's possible as comparison), and with a drive all his own. His death was a shattering moment in my life, though I wonder what would've happened had I grown up more with him around - but for a 13 year old, he was just about perfect.

This documentary looks at his life from start to end, from his childhood and early years gaining his footing as someone who just liked to perform for people on stage (from small clubs to Second City), to SNL and stardom. There are plenty of talking-heads to keep it all moving, plus photos and selected clips from when he was on stage at things like the small club in Milwaukee where he got more focused as a performer, and it's his family that sheds light on a man who was loaded for bear with passion for being silly and making people laugh (sometimes to borderline dangerous results - an anecdote about taking out his penis in a high school typing class is very funny and could only work with Farley and the context of the place).

There might have been a slight quality to some of this first half, and I think it's simply because the directors are making something for TV; this was shot for the Spike TV channel, and the filmmakers use light, bouncy (but very generic) music to move parts of it along, and the same type of generic music over sadder/darker moments when they pop up (mostly near the end of the movie). I also wish that the filmmakers, for all of the clips from SNL (of course) and Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, got other clips were featured to see his different roles (Wayne's World, Coneheads, Airheads, the final performances in Almost Heroes or Dirty Work), or even the audio for certain clips from his very early stage work. But most of all I wish the documentary were longer, and that the filmmakers went more in depth about the dark side of his life; it's not that it isn't touched on, and it's seen how he slipped off into despairing situations in addiction, but it's not given equal weight, and his final year is mostly skimmed over.

And yet the clips that are featured are wonderful, and the anecdotes from certain people like Bob Odenkirk (you can tell Farley was so important a person, nevermind talent, to him), Lorne Michaels, and cast from SNL like Myers and Sandler and Spade make for shaping up Farley as this genuinely good person who was just genuinely uncontrollable as a comic talent and (unfortunately) as an addict. I found myself laughing, big belly laughs I mean, for scenes from SNL that I've seen many times. Something about Farley was so genuine as a performer, there was no real BS about him, and he would go for a joke even if it wasn't there (the skit on the show where he's in the beard at the restaurant) which just shows his total tenacity. And yet it's also revelatory to how he was a solid Christian man in spirit. What's most fascinating about I Am Chris Farley is seeing a man who's own love of excess as an actor and as a man was his own undoing. I wish there was more detail.

"I Am Chris Farley" is a documentary about the late comedian. It takes archival footage and current interviews from family and other comedians to tell the tail of how a very talented young man lost his ongoing battle with drugs, alcohol, and fame.

Starting out as early as a child, Farley was always considered the class clown. He loved entertaining people and his sole purpose seemed to be just to make people happy. That's really kinda' sweet in itself. Most people could give a damn whether you're happy or not, but his sweetness went above and beyond. Even after he became a "star," he could still be found entertaining sick children, talking to homeless people, and just being an all-round nice person.

What troubled me most was how the majority of people--both family and friends--always wanted to remain comfortably dumb about his addictions, and these addictions did not manifest themselves later in his life. It seemed he had been dealing with an obsession with alcohol from his early years. He drank to excess MANY times, asking one of his friends (upon opening a liquor closet) "don't you just want to drink every last drop that's in here?" Many comedians who were interviewed admitted they knew what he was doing, but very few- -if any--really tried to get him help.

I had to re-think and re-think my review. It was extremely hard for me to review a biography on someone I really didn't care for that much. I did not care for his type of comedy because I've never been one for slapstick. I also did not care for most of his cronies: David Spade and Adam Sandler, in particular. Watching this bio, however, helped me understand just a little better where Chris Farley came from. He was never intentionally mean to anyone and only tried to make people laugh. The bio was well done.

This movie is unrated for language and brief nudity.

Chris Farley was an actor who threw himself into every role he did, not so much making a convincing character from nothing, but being so brazenly out of control and limitless that, by the end of the film or the respective Saturday Night Live sketch, you practically had to believe he was the real deal. His natural presence for comedy and trying to find the right moments to be completely ribald and pleasantly sentimental signifies him as one of the most talented comedy actors in years, and ever since I was young, I couldn't help but think what kind of path he would've made for himself had he not died so young.

I Am Chris Farley, a ninety-four minute documentary that will air on SpikeTV throughout the month of August and see a subsequent release on DVD and Blu-Ray, is a blatant love-letter to the comedian, and it's the kind of love-letter that really exhausts itself to show you everything there is to love about its subject. That's the film's greatest strength and its most notable weakness because, while we get to see every angle of Farley's comic abilities explored, depressingly little time is spent developing the very real drug and alcohol problems he battled throughout his life, which eventually caused his untimely death in 1997.

Farley grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, the middle child of three rambunctious brothers, encouraged by a father who loved to see their comic spirits run wild. Kevin Farley, who is a spitting image of his younger brother, recalls Chris constantly battling for the most attention from everyone in his family and often deservedly getting it for being so captivating and uncontrollable. Chris was a person who loved to run in groups, joining football and rugby during his school days, and routinely accepting dares and attempting to impress everyone around him simply because of his desire to be seen. He competed for attention; something that would undoubtedly earn him a spotlight at acclaimed venues such as Chicago's Second City and, eventually, Saturday Night Live, where, even through numerous film deals, he saw his home and the ultimate goal of his career.

Directors Brett Hodge and Derik Murray work to juxtapose film and sketch clips over the course of Farley's career with footage of his colleagues such as Adam Sandler, David Spade, Tom Arnold, Bo Derek, and Bob Saget speaking about their late friend and costar. The result is a familiar but effective structure thanks to how well the selected film clips mesh with Farley's personal life. Furthermore, a great deal of time is spent discussing Farley's comic talent and what made him so charismatic. Saget states that Farley had a "not give a s*** pride," which allowed him to be as raucous as he wanted; that meant taking off his shirt, dancing crazily all over a set, screaming and yelling to create a convincing, hyperactive character, and falling on the ground - without putting his arms out or creating a cushion - authentically. Anything he could do to add to the flavor and the zaniness of a sketch, he would and he would constantly make it work.

Few conversations on a professional or personal level concerning Chris Farley remain entirely positive, given his later years and his tragic death, which is why it's frustrating to see I Am Chris Farley so nonchalantly gloss over the effects and the circumstances leading up to and resulting in his death. I don't ever recall the word "cocaine," the drug that eventually killed Farley, being said in the film, nor any recollections from the interviewees when they found out about Farley's death. It's no doubt that everyone in this film has a strong love and respect for the late comic (by the end of the film, we almost want to throw our hands in front of ourselves and say, "we believe you"), but there's a disconcerting factor of being so in love with the subject that talking bad about a certain aspect or feature is a no-no here.

This makes I Am Chris Farley somewhat of a more sentimental documentary than one willing to explore how insecurities in the comedy world effect a person, especially for Farley, whose image was largely made up of a bumbling fat guy with little coordination and self-esteem. Although all of the footage here is rich and the documentary is nicely structured, there's something unfortunate about one half of the subject being covered with specifics and the other half, arguably just as important, being whitewashed almost entirely in generalities.

Nonetheless, I Am Chris Farley is a celebration at heart; a celebration of a life lost too soon and a comic actor that left as big of a footprint on the genre as he was himself. He was a personality film, the entertainment world, and comedy was sincerely lucky to have.

Directed by: Brent Hodge and Derik Murray.

A documentary on the comedian Chris Farley's life with interviews with fellow comedians and friends like David Spade, Christina Applegate, Mike Myers, Tom Arnold and Dan Aykroyd and others.

It also has Chris siblings, most notably Kevin Farley in it to provide stories of what Chris was like growing up.

Although it entertains and occasionally gets emotional when you see a hardended cynic like David Spade become emotional and having a hard time speaking it does feel like a very sugar-coated version of Chris' life.

It doesn't really speak much of Chris' hardships and why he became an addict and any real bad things that he did (which I imagine he did do as we all do) and it pretty much paints him out as a saint clown with self esteem issues.

Now I'm not saying that he wasn't a lovely guy, I'm sure he was, but there is a constant sense of "they're holding something back to save the memory of Chris Farley".

It's also very simple in it's structure, it has a couple people talk about Chris as a child to Chris getting into acting and Chris on the set etc etc, no fancy cuts or effects, more like a memoir collection than a full on documentary where you get to know the man up close and personal.

But still, worth the watch for sure, especially if you're a Chris Farley fan.