there's no question robin williams is my favorite
male actor and i've seen i've now officially seen every single film that
he has ever done which is quite intense um to say
and and one hour photo is one that i feel is massively underrated
that's not to say people don't love it it has a 6.8 rating
out of 10 on imdb people who have seen it
have you know praised it and said it's so well done and so moving and so
poignant but when i ask people their favorite
robin williams film i don't know if this one's ever actually
come up and i think maybe the main reason well two
reasons one the subject matter is very raw and brutal and we'll talk about that
in a moment but the other reason
is that it's not a comedy it's not funny and
obviously williams is best loved for his comedies but this
thriller is not not it's it's about as far removed
from mrs doubtfire as you could get so i'll read the description out there
won't be any spoilers in this because it has to be seen
to be believed so this was released in 2002
and the description from imdb is as follows
a mentally unstable photo developer targets a middle-class family after his
obsession with them becomes more sick and disturbing than any of them
could imagine and the first thing that's
disturbing about this is robin's hair
it's this very bright yellow blonde really sickly color
that just makes him look really creepy i don't know if he would look
creepy if i perhaps had never seen him in anything and didn't know who he was
but because it's so unusual to see him like that you just feel
kind of put off immediately now obviously this was set in 2002 and one
thing i not the one thing i love about this but
something i really like about this is the concept of having photos developed
i do miss going in and getting photos developed after taking them on a camera
and realizing half of them are rubbish but that's kind of that's almost like a
novelty of the film now and and basically this this character
seymour played by robin williams is
lonely and sweet at the beginning he's very likable
to begin with and i think this family the york and family are
really drawn into his warmth and obviously this family goes to them him a
lot to get their photos developed and then soon he starts to have this
unhealthy obsession not because i think he's envious of the
family but because he wants to be part of the
family but things take a very dark and twisted turn
he also has an unhealthy interest in the son um
jacob played by dylan smith and i wouldn't say this is a
kind of it's not a story of a pedophile as such
but there are definitely strong elements of that in there
but it's not just the sun he's also very envious of the father
and really wants the mother and it takes a dark turn and it's quite
uncomfortable and hard to watch as as one would expect um
it's produced um directed and written rather
by mark romanek and the narrative is just it's so
beautiful as a piece of art the way this story is told is exquisite the
development is fantastic the pacing beautiful the characters all
have really realistic responses
i i can't really comment on seymour's responses there's a lot of
psychoanalysis that could be done with this character and i'd really like to do
that or at least read others um kind of
professional interpretations of this character's behavior
i've also just noticed on imdb that this has won six awards so i'll have a quick
look uh robin williams
won best actor saturn award and
at the devil film festival the film won the premier audience award the
audience award the jury special prize the grand no it was nominated for the
grand special prize quite a few other awards there and a lot
of nominations this film is spectacular what makes this film better
than sliced bread is williams's performance
robin is amazing and
obviously he's done quite a lot of non-comedies i think the most
famous one is probably deadpool society which just so happens to be
my joint all-time favorite film but he's done a lot of other um
fantastic dramas and very serious films but this one without a doubt is one of
his most moving powerful exquisite performances and
he deserved every award he won for this and i'm getting a little bit emotional
just thinking about this film because he's fantastic
but it's moving it's powerful it's nothing like you would expect if
you haven't seen one hour photo i strongly urge you to do so