Three Nights With Robin Williams

...And Ben Stiller


     As I am sure you have figured out, I watched the Night at the Museum trilogy this week, and I realized as I was doing so that it was kind of my way to say farewell to Robin Williams.


     I found myself really enjoying, but assessing the characters in all three movies, and the characterizations. The only possible casting choice I find dubious is General Custer, but Bill Hader is hilarious- he just looks a little young to me.(We're Americans. We don't plan, we do!). Stiller and Azaria as Larry Daley and Kahmunrah respectively get to have some great verbal duels that harken back to Mystery Men.


     But to Robin...

     He's great as Teddy Roosevelt, nobody better I could picture- funny, but wise and mentoring at the same time. I may be imagining it, or I may be dead on, when I say I could see he was really tired in the third movie. I think it's natural, and oh, so very human to look for hidden clues after something like Robin Williams' suicide; to say "he looked so sad in that last movie...I can't believe we didn't see it". My Ex, Sam, talked a lot after "the Dark Knight" about how someone should have seen that Heath Ledger was really messed up, and helped him out, that not all of his chilling and freaky performance as the Joker was performance, some of it was the medicine he was on. But I digress- I am a known Digressor. (if you drift off onto another subject in order to avoid a fight, does that make you passive/digressive?)

     The ending of the last movie just seems so...sad, for Larry, and for the New York Museum bunch. Even the epilogue, 3 years later seems sad for Larry. I was seriously choked up for about the last half hour.

     For one of the last movies Robin Williams ever made, it was not his finest, but it sure wasn't bad, either. It was a suitable cap on his career, giving us all the ways he made us laugh and cry, in a neat little package.

     Thanks, Robin, for everything from Mork to now, you crazy, crazy, beautiful performer.