6 Best Releases Starring Robin Williams

Robin Williams already proved he could do serious, but in this trio of very different movies released the same year he also did creepy. To watch footage of Robin Williams’ stand-up career is to be both amused, and a little startled. He’s a non-stop joke machine, the words pouring out of his mouth, jumping from subject to subject and impersonation to impersonation. He seems to be a man possessed, jittery, sweating, eyes wide and manic. The obvious explanation was that, up until friend John Belushi’s death in 1982, Williams was famously addicted to cocaine. More than that, though, and what would be the thread that ran through virtually his entire career, was an aggressive, occasionally off-putting need to entertain, at all times. When Williams did comedy, whether on stage or in films, his dial was almost always stuck on 11. Sometimes this frenetic energy worked to excellent effect, such as in Aladdin. But too often it resulted in a run of exhausting yet mediocre movies like Father’s Day, where Williams and co-star Billy Crystal seemed to be engaged in a competition over who could serve up the biggest pile of ham. Even in the relatively charming Mrs. Doubtfire, he’s so relentlessly “on” that you can absolutely understand why Sally Field would divorce him. Williams eventually became synonymous with the image of a desperate for approval theater kid, as presently exhibited by James Corden, only (in Corden’s case) without the talent.   Continue Reading →

A few days ago, Quentin Tarantino went on a podcast. The topic of final films came up with him stating he wanted to go out on a high note because, in his view, there had been too many cases of great filmmakers going out with substandard works. Now, this isn’t always the case, but there is a long list of directors who concluded their careers on less-than-stellar works. Continue Reading →

There was a trend when YouTube first launched, one that still pops up from time to time, where a skilled editor will take a film such as Dumb and Dumber or Elf and recut the trailer as a horror film. These pet projects are amusing at first glance, and serve to highlight deeply disturbing elements of classic comedies generally played for laughs. They demonstrate the power certain filmmakers have to elicit a specific audience response often diametrically opposed to the given circumstances on screen.  Continue Reading →

Patch Adams is full of shit. I truly can’t think of a better way to describe it. I could come up with some convoluted metaphor and tell you that watching Tom Shadyac’s 1998 catastrophe is like going to a restaurant and having the waiter spit on your food. I could call it “Jojo Rabbit for the Clinton Era” or label it a “misguided crowd-pleaser.” But I won’t do any of that because I – unlike Patch Adams – refuse to bullshit you.  Continue Reading →

The thing about guilt is that it can wear you down until you’re more a cluster of exposed nerve endings than a human being. That, at least, is the premise behind The Night, a new psychological horror and debut film from director Kourosh Ahari. Set in Los Angeles and spoken almost entirely in Farsi, The Night is a wonderfully odd mix of being spare and a bit too much all at once.  Continue Reading →