RIP Robin Williams

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?

whoopi and robin were arguably equals if you were a kid looking for pg to pg-13 comedies at blockbuster in the 90s

(that is, took a gay role maybe a little out of guilt -- based in SF for much of his adult life, I think he was kind of consciously a homophile) xxxp

The sheriff's office is providing details now. He was discovered by his personal assistant.

yeah like I said yesterday Williams seemed one of the few stars of his magnitude immune to gay panic and able to spoof himself

XPS I remember it kind of being a big deal when Goldberg had a vehicle (Theodore Rex maybe) that went DIRECT TO VHS and how the mighty had fallen.

whoopi and robin were arguably equals if you were a kid looking for pg to pg-13 comedies at blockbuster in the 90s

― da croupier, Tuesday, August 12, 2014 12:25 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, me to a t

xp to me Oh good, one of them is another sequel to Night at the Museum. I love his Teddy Roosevelt.

Herb Caen in the SF Chronicle, 1995:

THE IRREPRESSIBLE one: In the April issue of the gay magazine, OUT, Greg Louganis says on the subject of a possible new mate: "This is extremely quirky, but I think Robin Williams is extremely sexy. He's intelligent. He's got a quick wit. Funny. Hairy chest. I do like that" . . . Louganis, the Olympic diving champ whose new book, "Breaking the Surface," is the No. 1 nonfiction best-seller in the country, was at A Different Light bookstore on Castro Tuesday evening. Some 2,000 people showed up -- including Robin Williams, who ran to the head of the line, hugged the AIDS-diagnosed Louganis and teased, "Here I am, your dream lover!" Then he scampered off without buying a book.

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.

This...this is an absolutely perfect description.

It might be strange to see an ep of M&M now where he says "Let me take that back" and does the backwards-talking thing, and the audience goes nuts. Actors weren't doing that on sitcoms then. Manic comedy on TV had been mostly stupid for a decade-plus, after the decline of the Sid Caesar generation, and he seemed to bring high-energy zaniness back to respectability. (The political and lit references were not the kind of thing you'd have gotten from Jerry Lewis in the '60s.)

http://www.vulture.com/2014/08/what-it-was-like-to-do-improv-with-robin-williams.html

"Mork & Mindy: In Mork We Trust (#1.21)" (1979)

Orson: The report, Mork.

Mork: This week I discovered a terrible disease called loneliness.

Orson: Do many people on Earth suffer from this disease?

Mork: Oh yes sir, and how they suffer. One man I know suffers so much he has to take a medication called bourbon, even that doesn't help very much because then he can hear paint dry.

Orson: Does bed rest help?

Mork: No because I've heard that sleeping alone is part of the problem. You see, Orson, loneliness is a disease of the spirit. People who have it think that no one cares about them.

Orson: Do you have any idea why?

Mork: Yes sir you can count on me. You see, when children are young, they're told not to talk to strangers. When they go to school, they're told not to talk to the person next to them. Finally when they're very old, they're told not to talk to themselves, who's left?

Orson: Are you saying Earthlings make each other lonely?

Mork: No sir I'm saying just the opposite. They make themeslves lonely, they're so busy looking out for number one that there's not enough room for two.

Orson: It's too bad everybody down there can't get together and find a cure.

Mork: Here's the paradox sir because if they did get together, they wouldn't need one.

Thinking about GWH, all his sessions with Damon aside, I think my favorite scene of Williams's is when he's in the bar with Stellan Skarsgaard and has to explain to him just exactly what's what with Will and his friends.

Glenn Kenny on Moscow on the Hudson:

It’s a lovely, loose, unselfconscious, limb-swinging performance so uninhibited, who can forget the sight of him, hairy as a bear from pretty much the neck down, lounging in that big tub with Maria Conchita Alonso? What amazes about his best screen-acting is the combination of discipline—he was Juilliard-trained, after all—and an exhilarating sense of him being present in every moment, ready for anything, always prepared to improvise the most alive response to his environment.

http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/08/robin-williams-obituary

I have a store credit at used dvd store near work...gonna swing by at lunchtime & see if I can pick up the Fisher King, or Garp, or Moscow on the Hudson.

glad this EW roundup of his lesser known films stans for The Best of Times and Club Paradise; the latter was a staple of late eighties cable

and a thousand xxposts by now but BLAM thank you so much for sharing those thoughts, and idk...i hope it gets better? xo

It has. And thanks.

some of his star vehicles seem oop on dvd?

The Fisher King is on Sony Movies later. I haven't seen it in years either.

Fisher King is on netflix too i think?

http://www.vulture.com/2014/08/what-it-was-like-to-do-improv-with-robin-williams.html

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, August 12, 2014 12:40 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is amazing, damn

The sad parts are confusing, and we talk about the Beastie Boys during them.

It's interesting to compare RW's reaction to improv-audience idiot suggesting "Flubber" to, say, Lou Reed stalking out when the local bakery is playing "Sunday Morning."

David Edelstein suggests that for a best-of we intersperse bits of talk show appearances with clips from "Popeye, The Survivors, The Best of Times, Seize the Day, Moscow on the Hudson, Cadillac Man, The Fisher King, Insomnia, The Birdcage, his appearance in Homicide: Life on the Street, and even Good Will Hunting (and a bit of his voice in Aladdin, of course)."

the only recent-ish things of his I'd seen were the episode of Law & Order: SVU that he did (inspired by the same case that inspired the movie Compliance)

wha

did he play the caller?

even Good Will Hunting

It's uncool to say you like that movie now?