There is only one thing everybody has been talking about all day and so there’s only one possible topic for my blog tonight, and that is the death of Robin Williams, one of the funniest men who ever lived.
It was the first thing I read when I signed on to facebook this morning and I’ve spent the day watching Mork and Mindy reruns (There were some laugh out loud moments for sure but it was not quite as funny as I remembered – what struck me was how different the 70s were, how puritanical and corny compared to today’s shows).
Williams in The Fisher King
I’m not going to dwell too much on the manner of his death. I see suicide as a choice rather than a sin. A tragic choice, and I’m sorry to learn that he was such a tortured soul, but he joins the ranks of Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Cobain, Alan Turing, Vincent Van Gogh and Socrates. Their importance to history, their contribution to human culture, the heaviness of their loss is in no way diminished by the manner of their passing.
One interesting thing in the comments is that, while everybody loved Robin Williams, we didn’t all love the same Robin Williams. Some people raved about his stand up, while others were much more fans of his movies. Among those who were fans of his movies, not everybody liked the same ones.
He sure made a lot of films and I’m a long way from having seen all of them. Two that a lot of people liked, which I’ll have to see now, are Moscow on the Hudson and Patch Adams.
Films that everybody raves about but which I think are over-rated include Mrs. Doubtfire and Dead Poets Society. They were both pretty good films, I’m glad I saw them and there were scenes which made an impression, but I really have no desire to see either one ever again.
Films which were big hits, and I totally agree that they were masterpieces, include Good Morning Viet Nam, Good Will Hunting and The Fisher King. Matt Damon owes his career to Robin Williams. And The Fisher King is one of the most perfect movies ever made.
A couple of lesser known films of his that I thought were brilliant are One Hour Photo and The Night Listener. When a movie reveals its entire meaning at the very last second and then ends and it surprises the hell out of everybody, that is art, that is genius, and One Hour Photo did that better than any movie since Citizen Kane, which is ancient.
One that nobody else mentioned and I get the feeling few people have ever seen, but I really liked, was called Being Human. It was a series of vignettes, with Robin Williams playing a prehistoric character, a Roman slave, and a modern man trying to reconnect with his children after a divorce.
Being Human. It’s something Robin Williams was exceptionally good at.
www.gurukalehuru.com 