RIP Robin Williams

very guilty lols

i've got a chris penn 'short cuts' action figure, complete with a bloody rock in hand

JUMANJI JUMANJI JUMANJI

Wow that the last photo of RW is at a Dairy Queen in lindstrom. My folks had a crappy little cabin on South Center Lake when I was a kid and Lindstrom was the nearest town. Unless that's a new Dairy Queen I've probably been there a million times. I remember passing hazelden in the car and having a weird vague kids understanding of what people did there.

xpost I'll trade you my extra squirt-action Huey Lewis figure.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller board game

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dq8nXLYEtQ0/hqdefault.jpg

I have this. I remember thinking, even at age seven or whatever - that's supposed to be Robin Williams???

I have never talked about my own thoughts of cutting my own life short, and it's hard to even type this given how far away they feel now. But hearing about RW's suicide, especially after having heard the Maron interview a few months ago, have really really knocked me for a loop by reminding me of just how dark things can be, and sad for him for the hell he must have endured.

I hope he has found peace, whatever that might mean for him.

First time I was in Keene, NH I noticed a large plaque or mural or something on the side of a building commemorating the fact that some of Jumanji had been filmed there.

I still have bottles of Griffin Mill water.

BLAM that is brave of you to post
i had a similar spell after seeing a picture of myself at age 5 clutching my popeye record
it's overwhelming
this is not "a celebrity death" to me, this is a high profile suicide and that's always a very jarring ghost

otm

yup

givin u a hug BLAM

Yeah the inner voice of depression is just so persuasive and convincing and authoritative and when someone commits suicide it is v chilling to me, like this is what i am running from and have been running from for more than half my life and may always be running from and if you stop running and let it hit you maybe something amazing happens but otoh maybe THIS happens.

i don't have much to add except that even in his terrible, saccharine films (and maybe especially in them), he seemed to convey this real desperation at being decent and being himself while surrounded by people who were disconnected from him and often acted cold towards him, like often his characters seemed to be very alone and singular in their world, and they used humor to cover up their sadness at that disconnect. and when he wasn't being a crazy clown or a goofy teacher or mrs doubtfire, in all those roles when the veil fell he had this really incredible sadness about him. like the courtroom scenes in 'mrs doubtfire', his panic at losing his kids was palpable. i don't know if he chose those roles because of that aspect or if it was something natural he conveyed. a little of both i imagine.

Comedian friend of mine R. Buscemi posted this on FB--video is only a minute but amazing.

Six years ago at Beth Stelling's and the Puterbaugh Sisterz's absolutely perfect weekly "Entertaining Julia" show in a Chicago dive bar, Robin Williams sauntered in wearing a sleek little black summer fedora (I believe Jena Friedman had befriended him the night before over at the Lake Shore Theater and told him to come over). He looked great, and we all tried mostly successfully to act normal. The bartender Julia told me later that he gave her a nice sum to keep his glass full of Coke all night, since he was fresh out of rehab and not drinking, and didn't want to be sent drinks. He joined Julia in the photo booth for pix and watched maybe a dozen of us comics file across stage for upwards of two hours as the pub gradually filled to bursting as people texted friends to hustle over. I said hi, as did lots of comics, and he couldn't have been nicer or more complimentary of the city and of people's sets. Then he took the stage and performed for ... well over an hour, I believe. It was late by that time. I couldn't repeat a single joke he told, but I can say this: I've never seen someone wreck a room that hard in my life. It wasn't just that he was famous -- he rode waves of laughter and his own imagination like an astronaut surfing the Milky Way, just a shortish, charming guy with a powerful build ripping laughs like taking a knife to a feather bed, like a downed power line showering sparks and writhing like a snake. I'll never forget it. So ... you know, peace. G'night, Robin. We're sad for you. I am anyway.

http://vimeo.com/977976

I think "Robin Williams sucks" has been prevalent in my circles since the movies got really oppressive, to the point where i defended theEvening at the Met show frequently as "the last time he was funny." The last occasion when I did, to someone with institutional hipster cred maybe a year or two ago, he kinda made a head-whirly gesture and blurted a mock-scared "OK!"

I guess Smoochy, Aristocrats, World's Greatest Dad sort of rehabilitated his chops in my eyes; I skipped all those kids' films he did, and anything where the trailers looked bad. One-Hour Photo was entirely mediocre but I thought the performance was credible.

The guy called his last standup album Weapons of Self-Destruction.

his comic and saccharine bits were already curdling (jack, father's day) but his post-oscar stretch of leading roles - What Dreams May Come, Patch Adams, Jakob The Liar, Bicentennial Man...no wonder he was exiled from coolness

What Dreams May Come

I've never seen it, but in the last 18 hours I've seen it held up as some people's favorite role of his and also an example of the worst of his worst.

mentioned yesterday they were hits without realizing that people saw them. Our office manager, a 29-year-old guy, said What Dreams May Come was one of his favorite movies; Jumanji too.

Did anyone else see "The Night Listener"? I remember liking it.

Been curious to see What Dreams... just bc it is Vincent ward and he is kind of a weirdo.

Siskel & Ebert loved What Dreams May Come.

that's another role of his where the sadness is palpable even when mixed in with all the wacky afterworld stuff

I saw What Dreams May Come and "personal favorite/worst of his worst" sums it up pretty well. It's such a ball-tripping absurdity - imagine Orpheus & Eurydice meets The Notebook - but Robin makes it stick despite itself

grand visions of heaven where you get to take any form you want and ride old-timey bicycles around pools

more like wet dreams may cum

man the plot synopsis of that one

i meant to say I saw What Dreams May Come in the theater. Can't remember why my friends wanted to see that

Chris awakens in Heaven, and learns that his immediate surroundings can be controlled by his imagination. He meets a man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) he recognizes as Albert, his friend and mentor from his medical residency, and the presence from his time as a "ghost" on Earth. Albert will guide and help in this new afterlife. Albert teaches Chris about his existence in Heaven, and how to shape his little corner, and to travel to others' "dreams". They are surprised when a Blue Jacaranda tree appears unbidden in Chris' surroundings, matching a tree in a new painting by Annie, inspired by Annie's belief that she can communicate with Chris in the afterlife. Albert explains that this is a sign that the couple are truly soul mates. Annie decides that Chris cannot "see" the painting, however, and destroys it. At the same time, Chris sees his version of the tree disintegrate before his eyes.

that movie had a budget of 85m in '98 dollars

I don't think anyone has mentioned Mime Jerry yet.

http://www.robin-williams.net/images/films/shakes/image07.jpg

Sounds dreadful, but I may watch it anyway.

"Even so, as far as most people today are concerned, his disruptive TV stardom in a piece of disposable Me Decade shlock is a mere prologue to a big-screen career that lasted over 30 years, earned him three Best Actor nominations as well as a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (for Good Will Hunting), and included its fair share of hits. While those stats make it counter-intuitive and then some to say Williams's Hollywood career was ultimately a failure, that's unquestionably what it was—by every criterion except raw numbers, a yardstick that sometimes mattered to him a lot and that he nonetheless had too much helpless acuity to trust as a be-all and end-all. Even when he had good parts, they never added up to a whole—and a version of Robin Williams that somehow incorporated everything under the 20th-century sun was his defining passion, after all."

http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2014/08/remembering-robin-williams.html

xpost WDMC has a suicide plot iirc

Never saw his Bill Forsyth film--very poor reviews at the time.

. While those stats make it counter-intuitive and then some to say Williams's Hollywood career was ultimately a failure, that's unquestionably what it was

man fuck that. dude's batting average was rough but his best was amazing. If his goal was to entertain, make people bust guts and feel something, it was ultimately a resounding success.

yep

I liked it, but I never disliked a Forsyth film

xxp

loved the Shakes mime bit

why is it every time i read a polite-but-firm dismissal of a legend's multi-decade career the author mentions a novel he wrote

that the author of the dismissal wrote, i mean.

i'm kinda with tom carson. i can't think of anyone (other than richard pryor who didn't do it as long) who was so naturally gifted and who made as much terrible stuff. Hook is one of the worst movies ever made and that's not even the worst robin williams movie. but i'll always like him cuz duh i grew up with him.

i'm surprised he never made a stab at Shakespeare aside from standup pastiche and a cameo in Branagh's Hamlet

(althouh deniro and pacino are obviously trying to beat some record for bad movies....)

i was already finding robin williams corny by the end of elementary school, but to look at what he accomplished and say "yes but he did a lot of crap, what a failure" jesus try looking back at your life's work in quarterly periods.

in the '80s I saw a handful of legendary comics in 'big rooms' (Pryor and Cosby in Radio City Music Hall; never Carlin unfortunately) and Williams led in bringing rock star energy to that format in a way I expect few did. (Pryor was more mellow by the Here & Now period, I'm sure in the '70s it was a different story judging by the concert films.)

the guy was certainly not a failure from the fan pov. All that chatter in the nineties about Tom Hanks as world's biggest star is kinda bullshit if you compared their nineties box office

Thanks, LaL and Morbs. Thankfully, at this point, it's like seeing a really bad apartment that I know I never ever have to live in again, but recalling with perfect clarity the absolute hell of living there and feeling complete sympathy/sorrow for someone who apparently never made it out.

As for his career, the scene I keep coming back to is the one early in Good Will Hunting where he bites at Will's bait of mocking his dead wife, and forearm in throat, threatens to end him if he does it again.

There's so much sadness and strength and loss conveyed so perfectly to me in that scene. The pure physicality of it just makes it more so.

yeah, i don't think he was a failure as an entertainer. he just made a lot of horrible movies and a lot of the stuff he did didn't play to his strengths. like carson says, anyone could have played those straight man/dead poet roles.

Hook is one of the worst movies ever made and that's not even the worst robin williams movie.

i've never quite understood why ppl hate this movie so much -- it's definitely uneven and has some really lame bits but RW is great in it. would definitely take it over most of the big-event 'kid' pictures from the early 90s.