RIP Robin Williams

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.

xpost

Bill Murray did quite a few of these too, but yeah, its rare.

RIP - I musta saw Moscow on the Hudson at least 4 times in the theaters - it may have been the movie that put me on the road to loving film. Fisher King is sublime, and his raunchy stand up was in a class of its own. So sad he's not around to get the laugh out of us anymore.

I don't think of Bill Murray as big box office by the mid and late nineties though. Williams just couldn't stop working.

i wanna watch that one episode of louie where they are together in the strip club

That dinner scene in The Birdcage is a masterpiece of sustained comedy ("And a man's wealth is measured by the size of his cock. Excuse me.").

Only dramatic roles I dug of his were Good Will Hunting and Fisher King, but yeah, he struck me as fairly one-note (that one note being a pensive soft-spoken "ohh"). Haven't heard his standup in ages, but I remember finding it hilarious at the time. I also remember it being refreshingly and shockingly (for the time) anti-Reagan/conservative.

shit. RIP

Williams just couldn't stop working.

Kinda like Updike, maybe.

He was the textbook example of comedians who think they need Serious Roles

i have to disagree with this. dude was a classically trained actor, not just somebody who came up through the chuckle-huts and then got pretentious. he had a mawkish side, also had a "i need to be working constantly" side, and between the two there's a lot of dross. but i don't think you get to like Moscow On The Hudson AND look at him as someone who didn't accept his station.

Mum took me to see Popeye when it came out in the theaters, so I was maybe 4 or 5 (underwater octopus scene scared the CRAP out of me). I loved Mork & Mindy from the moment I was old enough to talk, I think. I put this on FB but there's something about the sound of his voice, just hearing him talking is like hearing my childhood. And when he can make me laugh as an adult, it's like revisiting that place. I think that's why I liked his Teddy Roosevelt, corny as it was. It just felt good that he could make me laugh still.

I've always resented The Birdcage for reasons that were not at all the fault of the film: watching a film teeming with flamingly gay caricatures with your parents and the hetero best friend who you were nursing a huge secret crush on was not the most comfortable way for a closeted 15-year-old to spend an evening. I should give it another shot.

i've avoided the birdcage but mostly cuz i hate the visual style of later mike nichols movies

i have to disagree with this. dude was a classically trained actor, not just somebody who came up through the chuckle-huts and then got pretentious. he had a mawkish side, also had a "i need to be working constantly" side, and between the two there's a lot of dross. but i don't think you get to like Moscow On The Hudson AND look at him as someone who didn't accept his station.

well, I meant "Hollywood's idea of a serious role." I know Olivier starred in a few Jacks of his own.

RIP King of the Moon

honestly for the last 20 years i'd rather see him in a "dramatic" role than one that's distinctly "comic".

That dinner scene in The Birdcage is a masterpiece of sustained comedy ("And a man's wealth is measured by the size of his cock. Excuse me.").

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, August 11, 2014 7:43 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That scene is amazing. They're all great. Agador Spartacus! Also, "it looks like they're playing leap frog!".

FUCK THE SOUP

Of all the things Williams worked in, I think it's his Louie episode I'm going to watch tonight.

i'd really forgotten how much i liked him being around. hadn't seen him in anything since one hour photo which i thought was pretty decent.

I remember in 2002 when One Hour Photo and Insomnia came out it already felt like Williams time had past and he needed comebacks when, like, Patch Adams was only four years earlier.

*Williams' time had passed rather

I was fine with his family films like Mrs. Doubtfire and Jumanji. Didn't like him in films for grown-ups, especially his 2000s serial killer run.

I remember being weirded out when I found out he was a big fan of first-person shooter games at the same time I was
http://www.theninhotline.net/meatpers/img/e3.jpg

man...like everybody here it seems, I was conflicted about him - like, deeply talented dude, but also sort of incapable of checking himself at the door, no matter the role - though I thought he really worked hard at that in One Hour Photo. the first guy along with Steve Martin of whose ascent I was aware; in my sixth grade class, recaps of the most recent Mork & Mindy episode were de rigeur and the teacher would sometimes talk about the "deeper" ones - he really thought it was great, worthwhile television, but at the same time, it was just a TV show - watching dude go on to be Mr. Box Office was, like, I remember seeing this guy as a brand new thing, now he's everywhere.

while it's true that a lot of his schtick seemed to spring from some depths it's pretty shocking to me that he got so low -- though I know nothing about his personal life. it is always really troubling to me when somebody who has all the success in the world ends up too deep in the hole to climb back up, anyway. scary to me. hope his family finds some way to cope.

https://twitter.com/sesamestreet/status/498975277331267585

and don't forget "Homicide"

I remember being weirded out when I found out he was a big fan of first-person shooter games at the same time I was
http://www.theninhotline.net/meatpers/img/e3.jpg

God you can just picture him playing one too

^

on MSNBC Chris Hayes just played his first "Tonight" show appearance and mentioned that sense in which the guy wasn't totally sure how far he was going to go in the act of improvising

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