Tim Robbins is a different kind of actor in that he can look and sound completely professional or he can look and sound like an absolute oddball that you might walk away from even if you met him in an open space. He’s a great actor and has performed some absolutely amazing roles in his time, though as he started getting older the roles seemed to impress less and less. Some actors upon getting older start to go downhill a bit for various reasons, not the least of which is desire to be on camera any longer. But some tend to go downhill for other reasons, sometimes their health starts to fade, others times they simply lose the love for the business. You can’t really say that he’s not famous any longer since that would be an out and out lie, but there have been years in which Robbins’ career seems to have thinned out a bit, as though he’s given way to the next generations that have been on their way up.
Here are his five best movies.
5. The Player
If there was ever a movie to convince anyone that people in Hollywood can get away with just about anything this would be one of them at least. Mill is the kind of guy that knows how maneuver and scheme to get what he wants, but when he has a serious stalker on his hands he ends up killing the wrong man. Surprisingly enough though he gets away with this murder and his life continues to improve as he keeps on making the right moves, no matter how callous they are, and continues to ascend. One has only to look at this movie and think that it in some way applies to real life to see that there’s not a lot of justice when it comes to the world.
4. Arlington Road
Keith Phipps of the AV Club thinks that this might be a thinly-veiled movie that has its roots buried in the Oklahoma City bombing, and there might be some truth to that since the story is kind of depressing. There are a lot of dangerous things in this world, but a person that has holds a grudge and knows their way around building and planting bombs is one of the worst and most feared in this day and age. You can’t help but think that there might have been more than one reason why this movie was tucked away and almost forgotten after a while seeing as how history has shown us how very violent people can be when it comes to following their own misguided ideals.
3. Mystic River
One abduction and four days later and a life is ruined. Dave is never the same after what he endures for four days of his young life, though it extends all the way into his adult years. As he and his friends have drifted apart there is little to say other than that they don’t know how to reconnect as their lives took very different courses. Dave became the crazed, blue-collar worker while Jimmy became the criminal and Sean the detective. All three grown men have their own issues, but Dave is by far the most disturbed, which is saddening since by the end of the movie he’s the one that seems to suffer the most, until Jimmy ends that suffering and sets him free.
2. Bull Durham
Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post is easy to agree with since she speaks in such glowing terms of this movie, which deserves every word since it is that great. Ebby Calvin Laloosh is something of a dunderhead when it comes to his character, but he’s got an arm like a cannon and only needs a lot of work to find some control so that he can be one of the greatest pitchers in the minors. Enter Crash Davis, the guy who’s been there, done that, and kept on coming back for more. The pairing couldn’t be more perfect since Crash is all about slowing Ebby down and getting him to focus instead of relying on sheer emotion and instinct, which happens to be Ebby’s worst enemy from the start.
1. The Shawshank Redemption
It’s kind of amusing as Margaret Heidenry from Vanity Fair points out that this movie was never really given that much thought when it first came out since people expected a Stephen King story to be scarier, more intense, and a lot more focused on the supernatural or horrific. Instead we got this movie that’s more like a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo in a modern setting, for the time period at least. All these years later it’s become a favorite of so many that you might have thought that people had been hiding their love of the movie for years.
Tim Robbins is still fun to watch.
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