Still (Apple+)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today. In the show, we were talking about the Apple Plus documentary. Still so I don't do a ton of documentaries on this show. You know, when you have a movie or television show, you can talk about the acting, the writing, and documentary. A lot of times there's not that much to talk about, but I definitely wanted to talk about this one. You know, it's funny. I mentioned to my wife. I told her, I like, you should watch this. He said, I don't want to cry, And honestly, it's the reason I was hesitant to watch it as well, because I was afraid it would be extremely depressing and I would just be on the floor weeping the entire time. And I actually did not cry. I didn't cry, and I don't think that it's even particularly sad, and I think that that's actually what it's about. That it's not sad in a weird way. So yeah, it's it's I would say that if your concern is that this will be so depressing and oh it'll just be this devastatingly sad thing,

1:34 that's not what it's about at all. And I think that the fact that it's not like that is actually what makes it a great documentary. Really. Now, I will say there was there was one part I won't spoil it where I did actually almost cry, and that's when Michael J. Fox's Canadian accent came out at a very sweet moment. I went to film school in Canada, and there's a thing with Canadians when they get emotional or they've been drinking or whatever, there's like an element to the accent that kind of can become more pronounced, and that happens with him at this really particular moment and it was very moving and anyway, so I'm not going to spoil it for you, but that was the part where I almost cried. But what's most engaging about the documentary and it sort of is all tied into him, right, It's all about him, his personality, his career, and how he's dealing with Parkinson's. Michael J. Fox is the guy who always had like little guy syndrome in the sense that he got into acting because he always looked younger than he was. And then it was very difficult for him to achieve major success and he was totally broke until he got family ties, and then from there, pretty much every stage of his life is just running, running, running, running, like literally running, figurative and running. Just a workaholic, constantly working, ends up getting married, starts having children, and it sounds like his life didn't really change. At one point, he describes his wife as a single mom, which speaks to him being just gone all the time. The reason that this is called stay is because it took

3:05 Parkinson's to get him to slow down, and and and even Parkinson's, it's hard for him to slow down. You see him, you see the people with him, you know, caring for him, telling him repeatedly to slow down. And there's a part early in the documentary when he's kind of walking down the street and he just eats it into the concrete and a lady is walking by and sees him, and she sees him before he falls, and then after he falls, she goes back to see if he needs help getting up, and he says, you knocked me off my feet, and so he still has his incredible charm. Um. But yeah, it's like you get the sense that Michael was always just running and moving and doing stuff and it took you know, it's it's it's pretty clearly a point they make in the documentary that it kind of took this for him to slow down and be president with his family, and there's really there is like a beauty in that.

3:58 And you know, again he really says explicitly in the documentary like this, you know, if this was about oh poor me and all that kind of stuff, you know, how how boring would that be. He actually says that, you know, it's almost word for word at one point in the documentary. I don't know if he's um, you know what, I'm gonna look it up really quick. He still speaks. You know, it's not his his charm and his personality have not been diminished by the Parkinson's Like he's he's still in there, um, you know, and he's you can see him like he's still funny and you know, he's he's sharp. It's not it hasn't affected his mind, it's just it's you've seen how it's affected his body. So yeah, the last time he acted was in The Good Fight in twenty twenty, and then he did the audio narration of his of his book. Um, you see him according it in the thing in the documentary. UM. I hope, I honestly hope that he does some voice work. I really think he could. I know it would be challenging for him, UM, but you know, I feel like he do it.

5:00 What I found really remarkable is that at the end of the documentary I kind of realized, Wow, this has just been him the whole time, Like it's not one of those documents we're flying around a million different talking heads. It's really pretty much just him, and it's totally compelling. It was it went by really fast. I found like it was one of those things where it was hard to pull myself away. You ever watch something where you're you know, you have other stuff you gotta do, and you're like, ah, I can I can push it another ten minutes. I want to keep watching this. That's what it was like watching this. I actually think it's a great show biz documentary as well, because it's really like how this is all tied up into his career is a significant part of the story. You know, when Michael eventually gets diagnosed with Parkinson's, he hit it for like seven years and just kept working, and it required him to not only be acting, but also on top of the acting, he has to do things with his acting to hide his Parkinson's symptoms, and he has to carefully modulate, Like wend He's taking the drugs that helped tamp down those symptoms so that you know they're active when he's working, and it's hard enough to be an actor, you know, to then do all of that. It shows you what an incredible actor he really was, and it actually made him in a weird way, like see McQueen. Like see McQueen. My favorite story for Magnificent seven. L brennan was pissed off because Steve McQueen kept drawing attention away from him because he was always polishing a glass doing some of his hands and Michael did that too, but he just did it to hide his parkinson symptoms.

6:30 I also did not know about his alcoholism, which he talks about very candidly in the documentary. You know, and just generally this kind of frantic quality of his life. I think that most people when they think about Michael Jay Fox, they think that he's just a really nice guy. And he's a nice guy, but but you know, you don't necessarily think that he had all these challenges, and he really did. It's a very intimate look at all that, and he handles the Parkinson's very gracefully, and I think the documentary does an excellent job of avoiding the temptation of the hanging fruit right. It could easily there's a million different moments in the documentary that could have easily been very smaltsey, and it's not at all. It's one of those things that you watch and you really stop and take a sagad and have some perspective about your own life, because you know the stuff you take for granted.

7:16 It's very life affirming. I think it actually makes to me what I took away from him is like, even with something like this that is so challenging happening to him, you know, he hasn't been diminished by it. And there's you know, while obviously it's a terrible thing that he's going through, there are elements of it that were positive for him as as sort of a side effect of it, you know, in terms of really now being present for his family, and again he'd be you know, explicitly kind of calls that out in there. It reminded me a lot of the Brian De Palma documentary, if anybody's seen that. And also the kids stays in the picture. So those are two other really good like show based docs. One basically one speaker. And there's an ante that Brian De Palma tells in that documentary about Michael J. Fox. So Brian de Palma does a Vietnam movie.

8:05 I think it's I want to say, Casuals of War and there's a scene when Michael J. Fox has to get really mad at Schohn Penn and Michael J. Fox is just not getting there right, They're doing taking He's not getting there, and Shohn Penn finally like pushes him and he says under his breath to him television actor, and then Depalmas like, all right, role it. And then Michael J. Fox got there right, He got where he needed to go to get really mad at Schohn Penn, and they got the porns they needed. And that really makes sense even more after watching this documentary because that's Michael J. Fox this whole thing. He's like, you know, he is almost the epitome of that, that kind of truism. It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight and the dog Like that's his whole thing. He's always been like, you know, I'm the little guy, but I'll you know, even again, he even says in the documentary it's like, hey, you know, if you you might be bigger than me, but I will hit you and I will hurt you. Right, He's he's like a force of nature. I knew the name Davis Guggenheim on the director and you hear him kind of off camera interviewing Michael throughout the documentary. I was like, I know the name, you know, so I wouldn't looked up what he's done.

9:09 First of all, Davis Guggenheim extremely cool guy. Went to Sidwell friends, I went to Baltimore Friends. Worked on The Shield and Deadwood, along with a ton of other stuff NYPD Blue, I mean really a ton of great credits. Married Elizabeth Shoe and then directed three or four of the best documentaries in the last like twenty years. So he did an Inconvenient Truth he named me Malala waiting for Superman. So definitely a documentary director who's at the top of his game. I would add as a last point, you know we've all if you're listening to those, chances are you've seen Back to the Future, right. I had no idea that the way that Michael J. Fox made Back to the Future was like one of the most insane, workaholic things that I can possibly imagine, And for him to pull that off and give the poormans that he does in Back to the Future is amazing. So that whole segment we find how he made Back to the Future where he was like literally like he breaks it down the entire day schedule because he was doing his sitcom and doing Back to the Future simultaneously, leaning like on the same days. He for him to do it required him to sleep two hours a night it was, and they break it down like almost an hour by hour how he did it, And anyway, I thought that was really interesting as well. So there's a lot of great like showbiz stuff in this as well as a very moving but not super depressing portrait of someone going through obviously this terrible disease. So still Michael J. Fox excellent documentary, totally worth watching.

10:39 Not only will it not bum you out, but I think you'll come out of it feeling really sort of energized in a positive way. I think his positivity totally comes out of this documentary. So I totally if you have a plus, really encourage you to watch still and honestly, even if you don't, I would rent it, like I think it was that good. So that is the show for today. As always, thank you so much for listening. You can always reach out to me at dan advoidmia dot com and we're down on Twitter, watch This Tonight on Instagram, and watch This Night podcast on TikTok. I did get a little note from a listener because I'd asked for people's favorite, you know, their dad's favorite movie, and he mentioned Enemy Mine, which is a nineteen eighty five sci fi action movie starring Dennis Quaid and Lue Gossip Junior directed by Wolfgang Peterson. And it's basically like a like a bromance between a spaceship pilot played by Dennis Quaid and and I think I guess lue Gossa Junior plays like an alien and it's like anyway, So I just thought what a great I felt like a great pick for a dad movie. So yeah, I appreciate that's my buddy Nate listener of the show for sending that over great dad pick. Anyway, that is the show for today. Thank you for listening until next time. Bye bye mm hm m m m m m m m m