RIP Robin Williams

fucking hell

holy shit

:(

i wanna watch mrs doubtfire

RIP

oh i know he made some really bad movies along the way but I always really liked him and this is super sad

yknow, I haven't liked him in much recently but I loved his Theodore Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum movies. I found him v endearing

THE FISHER KING

oh goddamn it

I can't remember him in much but I know I've seen him in plenty. Transcends most of his films. RIP

Fisher King was always my favorite of his

recent Louie season before last was terrific. And Insomnia...

Fisher King is fucking rad, so great

I highly recommend the Marc Maron interview with him from a few years back on his WTF podcast. You'll probably have to pay to listen to it now or steal it but it's really really good. He was v quiet and humble within himself, such a contrast to his big stage persona

Thought he was very good in One Hour Photo and Insomnia, which appeared almost back-to-back. You could see him trying for something different, and indeed, they were two of the politest movie psychotics I can think of.

I had that thing younger folks must have with Bob Saget, where I knew him from TV when I was 8-9 and then heard his raunchy stand-up a year or two later.

The World According To Garp and Mork & Mindy were my childhood faves :(

World According to Garp probably his best role. Sorry to hear he's gone. I agree that he always had a tears-of-a-clown thing about him. His persona was so manic, even without the drugs, that it's easy to intuit a flipside.

Unexpected and sad, although I didn't like his comedy or acting.

x-posts His stand up was so raunchy!

Fisher king is amazing and I love The Birdcage forever and I also like Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets (shut up I was the right age for it at the time) and when he was on he was great.

Moscow on the Hudson is a wonderful picture that I talked up a lot when Mazursky died. He stays in character and uses an accent to better effect than RoboStreep did at the time. His late nineties blockbuster run was horrifying -- a sign that the guy really would've sung "Mammy" if we'd asked.

really couldn't stand any of his Oscar-nominated roles tbh

He singlehandedly made Good Will Hunting for me, he seemed to tap into a real heavy sense of loss...

A family friend ended up at a dinner hosted by Emeril and attended by Williams maybe 10 years ago and I remember her saying that the two of them got shitfaced and just ripped on one another all night and that the entire table was in stitches and that he was genuinely amazingly funny in person. I always kind of wished I could see that.

He was really great in GWH!

to me he gave the most touching performance in The Birdcage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgutlT2X4gM

Ned retweeted this & it cracked me up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35YHvoNXxAA

My faves were always his first two, Popeye and The World According to Garp, though its been years since I've seen either. Scanning IMDb, 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) and Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad. The latter, for anyone who knows it, now feels disquietingly topical.

Kinda expected him to always be around. RIP.

I really liked him in World's Greatest Dad, though the movie itself went off the rails.

he was a really not-very-good mimic from what little I've seen; those who know, how much of a selling point were the wacky voices at the outset?

man. A half dozen of his films were on constant rotation in my childhood. Could never feel any great antipathy to even his worst material due to that + the fact that his missteps were all borne from very good intentions.

yeah i was not wild about 'world's greatest dad' as a whole but his performance was really good.

dude could be so affecting in movies (otm re him in world's greatest dad, esp the first half). he'd been really open about his need to keep busy, and i wondered what he was going to do now that his show got canceled. seriously sad that he couldn't figure out a way to survive.

imo his impressions were more about abandoning himself to the stream of consciousness than the impressions themselves. The madness of a hyperactive thinker.

otm

Damn

JAAAAAACK

;_;

How does Aladdin hold up for you guys? To me it's a decent and fun G-rated synthesis of his standup routine.

watched it within the past year w my daughter - it's okay (a portent of awful things to come in the voiceover industry, but that's not his fault)

this is hitting hard.

way more than anybody who made an album.
i guess it's an age thing, but robin as mork, hit home for me on a scale i had never experienced before and wouldn't again until 'cheers'.
and then, every time, every SINGLE time i saw or heard him interviewed, i felt even more connected.
he never ever came over as a movie star player, but a man with a passion and a love for his art and a need to make an audience laugh.

rip robin, thank you for the good times.

He was very funny stepping out of character during a commercial break on Larry Sanders (after doing manic stuff for a few minutes--I just wasn't a fan of that side of him): "Hey, it's a business, get used to it--blow me."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG1YlnrQAnM

he had a helluva of a nineties run: from Mrs Doubtfire through 2000 the guy was a huge box office star.

I have mixed feelings about him overall - obviously talented, could be funny and moving on occasion (when the material suited him), but there was always this straining desperation about him, and a lot of his stuff was crap (90s blockbusters as noted). He's been a fixture since my childhood (Mork, Garp, standup comedy benefits); I feel like I always wanted to like him more than I actually did, his trying-too-hard-ness often seemed to get in the way.

xp

Don't like Aladdin. Especially now, it feels like it inspired/anticipated much of the Shrek-style obnoxiousness that came to dominate too much animation in recent years. For years, it has been my personal policy to ask anyone who claims to like the film if they've seen the 1940 The Thief of Bagdad.

I have mixed feelings about him overall - obviously talented, could be funny and moving on occasion (when the material suited him), but there was always this straining desperation about him, and a lot of his stuff was crap (90s blockbusters as noted). He's been a fixture since my childhood (Mork, Garp, standup comedy benefits); I feel like I always wanted to like him more than I actually did, his trying-too-hard-ness often seemed to get in the way.

yeah that mawkish note he couldn't resist hitting. He was the textbook example of comedians who think they need Serious Roles

last 3 posts are where I'm at with this guy

didn't like a lot of his work but always dug the guy rip

suicide is devastating and i hope he rests in peace and that his family makes it through this okay. i have very mixed feelings about robin williams -- if it were just about him as a performer, that'd be one thing, but in his stand-up days he stole so many jokes from comedians that they didn't even want to go on stage if they knew he was in the building. that's stealing from the livelihoods of other creative professionals even when you could just fucking HIRE a joke writer = not cool.

i will chalk it up to mental illness.

Just occurred to me: was he the only box office star who didn't mind supporting roles and cameos? I'm thinking of his awesome bit in Dead Again as this foulmouthed doctor.

his missteps were all borne from very good intentions.

well said. he seemed like a wonderful man.

i read "Roger's Version" for the dirty bits

up to you what tense you choose for the verb in that sentence

THNH is the worst novel i've ever finished.

I was infatuated with A Prayer for Owen Meany in tenth grade for about three weeks.

meeeeeee toooooooo

I have never gone back to it because I feel rather affectionate towards my younger self's love for that book and I don't want to ruin it. Also, I think books like that, where the structure is so plainly visible, do help kids learn something about how novels are made and how they might start working on their own.

shrewd point

Looooved Owen meany when I was 19. My mom and I both read it that year and that hasn't happened before or since. Will probably never reread for xpost reasons. In general, Irving was like a Tom Robbins I didn't hate.

Gotta agree with the sentiment that Owen Meany is a great book for that age; it was for me, but I never want to revisit it

Lost all interest in Irving when I realized he really was willing to milk that semester in Vienna for dumb coloration in EVERY goddam novel he wrote.

According a poster on the Criterion forum, Terry Gilliam has revealed he's in the middle of preparing materials for a CC release of The Fisher King.

just registering myself as another guy who read all the john irving books in high school.
plus dean r koontz and robert r mccammon and stephen king and vonnegut and a lotta other pulpy stuff

I remember Stuart Dybek talking about taking a class taught by John Irving while he was writing Garp. Irving would basically just bring in the new pages he'd written that week and read them to the class. A part that didn't make it into the book was a long (like 70 pages) Faulknerian tangent about the Rath brothers who ran around Appalachia committing petty crimes and raping women. One of the students said he should cut it from the book, publish it separately and call it The Rapes of Rath.

Watched World's Greatest Dad over the weekend. Unsettling viewing now and even if things go off the rails in typical Bobcat fashion, Williams is tremendous.

otm

the scene where he finds his son & breaks down on the bedroom floor is moving & beautiful in a v haunting way

This guy really, Really, REALLY likes Garp: http://m.hitfix.com/motion-captured/is-the-most-timely-movie-of-2015-a-blu-ray-release-of-a-movie-from-1982

Not the first Caitlyn Jenner/Roberta Muldoon contrast I've had pointed out during the last few months, but I'm pretty sure the first time I've seen it in print.

Robin's widow: He had Lewy body dementia.

“It was not depression that killed Robin,” she told People. “Depression was one of let’s call it 50 symptoms, and it was a small one.” Mrs. Williams gave the magazine an account of her late husband’s struggle with Lewy body dementia, the second-most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s disease. The disease, which is difficult to diagnose, causes a progressive decline in mental abilities, with hallucinations and muscle rigidity. The disease started taking its toll on Mr. Williams in the last year before his death, with heightened levels of anxiety, delusions and impaired movement. “They present themselves like a pinball machine,” Mrs. Williams said, referring to the symptoms. “You don’t know exactly what you’re looking at.”

The actor’s symptoms worsened in the months leading up to his death. He experienced crippling anxiety attacks, a “miscalculation” with a door that left his head bloodied, and muscle rigidity. And yet still his team of doctors could not pinpoint exactly what was wrong. Mrs. Williams said last year shortly after the actor’s death that he had been suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. But in the People article she said that doctors later discovered the Lewy body dementia when they performed an autopsy. Lewy body dementia is frequently confused with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease. The symptoms can overlap, and many health care professionals remain unfamiliar with the disorder. About 1.3 million people — considerably more men than women — have Lewy body dementia, named for the scientist, Dr. Friedrich Heinrich Lewy, who identified these protein deposits in the brain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/health/robin-williams-lewy-body-dementia.html

so sad. i feel like i read that he something like this a few months ago. was it only made public recently?

this is new

I hope they name that tunnel in Marin after him, that would be cool

Bobcat Goldthwait talked briefly about it a little on the nerdist podcast a month or two back, i dont think he stated the disease specifically but said Williams had something that manifested like parkinsons & gave him a lot of physical & mental difficulty. he didn't believe depression had as much to do with his death as as the disease

This was made public aaaages ago, perhaps when the autopsy results were released.

http://m.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full

sorry here's the non-mobile link http://www.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full

his wife wrote an editorial for neurology about his symptoms/diagnosis and LBD. it's brutal.

Yeah, saw that yesterday -- a harrowing and powerful read.

man, def. brutal. had no idea he had suffered so much for years leading up to his death

damn

Lewy body dementia is what got my dad. Same sort of slow, quiet start, which he largely kept secret (for at least a couple of years), followed by a rapid decline in the final several months. The paranoia, hallucinations, insomnia, tremors, all of that, though in the end it was the inability of his brain to simply tell him he was thirsty that finally did it.

one of the greatest improvisers/comedians of all time, sorely missed

The new biography by Dave Itzkoff is getting glowing reviews; not sure I have the will to read it.

just watched the HBO special, pretty good, bummed me out

otoh this did actually happen:

I hope they name that tunnel in Marin after him, that would be cool

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, November 3, 2015 1:16 PM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, we totally went through it on the way to San Fran!

I'm saving the doc for after a herculean lump of work I have to get done by monday, looking forward to it tho

there is also a big Robin Williams mural on the laundromat down the street from me, and I guess another fancier one just went up on Market. So he is being commemorated appropriately, which is nice. There was some really funny stuff in the doc, made me miss him

just got the Robin bio out of the library, immediately turned to the passages about the Met special and Waiting for Godot (as noted previously, the two times i saw him perform). The first was considered a career crest, the second an awkward flop (I liked it better than that).

I was just watching something about Robin Williams with my daughter. At the end I asked her what she thought about it, and she said it was good, but she really didn't like Robin Williams. I asked her why, and she said he was kind of a bad guy. I asked her what she was talking about, and she dismissively said "oh, he wrote that really sexist song with Robin Thicke." I was, like, what the hell are you talking about? Robin Williams never wrote a song with Robin Thicke. And then I thought, ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh ...

You're thinking of Pharrell Williams!

Now she and Robin Williams are cool again, but I guess she's got beef with Pharrell.

Pharrell Thicke otoh

hah.

Funny timing, my son was watching the original Jumanji this morning and was telling me how much he likes Robin Williams (I think he really mostly knows him from the Night at the Museum movies and Mrs Doubtfire). He asked me if I thought he'd ever do another Museum movie and was really sad when I had to break the news.

Pharrell Thicke otoh

Can hear Sylvester saying this to Tweety Pie tbh.

oof

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=258xga9HsjE

At the beginning of "quarantine" we took a drive around to check out some of Chicago's most notable murals, which resulting in this gem of a shot of one kid who is most definitely posing against her will:

https://i.imgur.com/qyZU47f.jpg

pic.twitter.com/me6uYzmtQF

— SNL Hosts Introducing the Musical Guest (@snlhostsintro) October 13, 2022

Why was he never on STar Trek