Word: robin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...serious-minded people get ahead in America. The road to the White House is littered with bodies of wits like Fred Harris and Mo Udall and Bob Dole. Business leaders and college presidents--they're not funny. Being funny is not even the way certified funny people get ahead. Robin Williams won his Oscar for one of his suffering-psychiatrist parts. Steve Martin now works with David Mamet...
...surgeon Meg Ryan--and you have to admire the daring of a movie in which Meg Ryan playing a heart surgeon is not its most farfetched element. But both films pale in audacity next to What Dreams May Come, released last month to fair box-office returns and featuring Robin Williams as a doctor who dies and goes to heaven and then journeys to hell to rescue his wife. And yes, that makes a trend: unintentionally goofy metaphysical romances about death are the volcano movies...
...Alarmist starts as a modified Robin Hood where "the den" is a circa 1954 sushi restaurant, and the merry men have been compressed into several burglar alarm sales-people bent on income redistribution. Anyone familiar with Los Angeles will realize the timeliness of their "rob the rich" scam in which Heinrich Grigoris (Greg Tucci) boosts the sales of his alarms by staging robberies in the neighborhood of his potential clients. The twist in Grigoris' scheme is Tommy, the new salesman played with adorable, bumbling style by David Arquette. The real credit in The Alarmist must go to the actors. Like...
...experience briefly sobers Lee. He has, but fails to appreciate, an equivalent to Robin's Tony. She's a pretty, sensible book editor (Famke Janssen) who supports his return to fiction. But even with her patient encouragement, he can't stay straight for long. He betrays her for a promising, utterly self-absorbed young actress (Winona Ryder). Maybe he can get in on the ground floor of her celebrity...
...state of grace they enjoy is not secular sainthood. That is to say, it is generally unearned by good works and suffering. It is, at best, a capricious cosmic joke and therefore nothing to get puffed up about. "I've become the kind of woman I've always hated," Robin says wonderingly at the end of her journey, "but I'm happier." There's a moral buried inside that irony. Or maybe it's the nasty core truth of our times. Whatever it is, Celebrity is the first fully serious (and seriously funny) movie about the issue that touches...