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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Sunday, January 20, 2002
18:09 - Hey, Robin Williams-- You Seen Robin Williams Lately?

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I'm really wondering about Robin Williams lately. There's almost nothing left of the rampaging manic comic that we all loved so much throughout the 70s and 80s. The movie scenes where he would suddenly go off into one of his trademark ad-lib sessions, like the radio studio scene in Good Morning Vietnam, and the entirety of Aladdin... they're almost all gone now. And in their place is sentimental pap.

We should have seen the warning signs in Mrs. Doubtfire. Aside from the impressions scene toward the beginning where he uses up his ad-lib-scene card trying to impress a job counselor ("Nancy and I are still looking for the other half of my head"), and a later one where he impersonates the various freaky nannies over the phone, the humor only had the occasional foray into the old Williams style. We should have seen it coming...


Because the next thing that put Williams on the map was Patch Adams, a movie whose promotional poster was described by CNN's Paul Tatara as "like being punched in the gut with a fistful of dollars". Only the most occasional of Williams-brand stand-up scenes, and most of it was simply a movie that dared the audience not to like it. A movie about a kindly doctor who dispenses services for free to take care of sick children while wearing a red clown nose... it's like pressing the big "AAAWWWWW" button on the switchboard. Sentimental pap, like I said.


And it wasn't long after that that we got Bicentennial Man, with almost the same promotional poster, an even more humorless premise, and not even a hint of Williams throughout. Not the way we knew him, certainly. It's the puppy-dog-eyes Williams now, the play-it-safe Williams, the I-dare-you-to-pan-this-movie Williams. Sure, Bicentennial Man is pretty good, but it's so sickly-sweet and sentimental (in a way that A.I., of all things, was not) as to sap away any bite that the movie might have had. And the humor had no Williams in it. Just the occasional feeble one-liner surrounded by doe-eyed, staid confusion.

I guess everyone ends up getting typecast eventually. I just wish Williams had become typecast as an edgy comedian, rather than as a sugar-coated placebo of an actor.

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© Brian Tiemann