RIP Robin Williams

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.

i just wish he had made more insane black comedies written/directed by funny/talented people. but obviously HE had a big jerry lewis maudlin streak or he wouldn't have kept making the deadly stuff.

i get saying something re comedy/drama like chris rock's "i know a lot of people who could make The Truman Show work, but only one guy who could pull Dumb & Dumber off" but when people say "anyone could have done dead poet's society" its never someone i believe could.

All that chatter in the nineties about Tom Hanks as world's biggest star is kinda bullshit if you compared their nineties box office

ehhh toy story 1 & 2 beats aladdin, forrest gump beats mrs doubtfire, apollo 13 and saving private ryan bigger than the birdcage and hook, etc

man, i am not going back to Hook to see what i hated about it. i never want to see it again. it offended me in some way. i felt like it was really dishonest and manipulative. the worst spielberg/williams impulses. would rather watch jumanji again.

Jumanji holds up a lot better than Hook

kevin kline could have done dead poets. daniel day lewis. liam neeson! that would have been cool.

hmmmm, "anyone" could play those roles is a bit harsh. I can see through the artificiality of Dead Poets and Good Will, but also RW's aura of empathy that led him to be cast in them. xxxxxp

obv both the Oscar-winning "It's not your fault" GWH scene and Robert Sean Leonard's arc in DPS have a terrible extratextual connotation now.

I wasn't much of a fan of most of Williams's career, which makes things awkward.

if you're determined to talk about it, and the time he said he liked your novel, a day after he dies, yes

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.

To say that no one else could have played the teacher in DPS isn't a defense of that movie. I think by that point he'd become an Ovitz-fueled commodity around whom "Robin Williams vehicles" were being produced

kevin kline could have done dead poets.

he kinda did in In and Out!

maybe if you combine robin williams and whoopi goldberg into one person you have some competition for 90s tom hanks

Kline's energy would have been cruel and almost psycho, which, yeah, might have made a more satisfying movie aesthetically but not what the screenwriters and producers wanted.

Whoopi's nineties hits are Ghost and Sister Act.

RW got to explore the full range of his talent in more projects for larger audiences and more money than most performers could even dream of. And the flipside of staying that busy for that long is that it can't all be great and you're not going to stay cool for very long. We can hem and haw about some hypothetical perfect role missing from his filmography, but it seems like he got to do everything he could do, the kind of career you just wonder if Belushi or whoever could've had and didn't so we get to idealize and lionize those other guys more.

i thought she was everywhere. she gives me a robin williams vibe for some reason. xp

otm xpost

whoopi had a ton of movies but only one truly huge leading role in the 90s

his Harvey Milk would've been intriguing, tho he seemed way too goyish

His white-hot standup period featured a few too easy lisping-swish laughs, so I wonder if he purposefully went for the Cage aux Folles remake after the H Milk movie fell through (if my chronology is right).

What are these few films in the can we have yet to see? I know one of them is an xmas movie, but I don't know about the others. Starring roles? Cameos?