On Saturday, January 6, 2001 at 2:57:33 AM UTC-8, NowReVuing wrote:

Robin Williams is a schizoid encyclopedia of topicality who owes everything he
is to the media; he has become a mutation of trash overload. Without his live wire "Name That Impersonation" energy, would audiences accept him? They didn't
in his best performance -- as a Russian in Paul Mazursky's "Moscow on the Hudson." His fawning public didn't go see "The Fisher King," and there was no stampede to see "Awakenings." I wonder if the huge box office for "Mrs. Doubtfire" is less a triumph than inheritance? That is, audiences will go see Williams in just about anything so long as he pulls everything down to a hyper-comic denominator. Even when it doesn't belong -- as in "Good Morning, Vietnam." Audiences don't see anything in him beyond free-floating caricature.
This talent a mad, whirling brilliance, and in concert, it's genius as if on speed. Yet the intensity can be exhausting; as an ultimate satirist of trash, Williams is crazed, maddening, always amusing, but, alas, very tiresome. His feverish, manic mimicry is so abundant and convulsive that, when not checked by
a strong director, it spills over onto everything and what might otherwise by a
fine performance gets displaced. Williams's talents for mimicry helped him enormously with the Russian language in "Moscow," yet there's not a trace of his concert mania. And what he does in "Moscow" is neither subdued nor condescending -- it's show-stopping stuff in the most sincere movie way imaginable. (How ironic that during Reagan's hyped commie hatred, Williams, excessively American, used his hairiness, healthy complexion and ingratiating voice to become the screen's most romantic Russian -- beating out Mikhail Baryshnikov.) It was in "Good Morning, Vietnam" that I started getting very tired of the growing garbage heap that is Williams' repertoire. It has its place, but not in Vietnam. I'm not taking a solemn position: Vietnam was a savage laughing war because of all the hypocrisy and lies. Using those elements, as Robert Altman did in "M*A*S*H," they're savagely, brutally funny.
But coming from Williams, the laughs aren't razor-sharp observations, they're convulsions from a media junkie.
More on Oldies But Goodies: http://members.aol.com/NowReVuing/Index.html

https://www.cbr.com/good-morning-vietnam-true-story/

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