Poignant yet fragmented - with trivial, star-studded subplots - it unabashedly idealizes RFK, presenting him in an almost saintly light.
Bobby (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:161
Fresh:72
Rotten:89
Average Rating:5.6/10
Consensus: Despite best intentions from director Emilio Estevez and his ensemble cast, they succumb to a script filled with pointless subplots and awkward moments working too hard to parallel contemporary times.
Theatrical Release:26-01-2007
Synopsis: An ambitious labor of love from writer/director/star Emilio Estevez, BOBBY attempts to distill the hope, anger, and confusion that gripped the U.S. in the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement... An ambitious labor of love from writer/director/star Emilio Estevez, BOBBY attempts to distill the hope, anger, and confusion that gripped the U.S. in the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement still reeling from the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the country embroiled in the confusion of Vietnam, Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign preached a message of peace and tolerance. In a style similar to the sprawling works of Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson, Estevez uses the June 4th, 1969, assassination of Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as the means to take a snapshot of the problems facing the country as the 1960's came to an end. The hotel is a microcosm of class and race, with characters bouncing off each other until the violent conclusion. African-American head chef Edward (Laurence Fishburne) presides over a kitchen staffed primarily by Mexican Americans who are the victims of the racist restaurant manager, Timmons (Christian Slater). Timmons is reprimanded by hotel manager Paul Ebbers (William H. Macy), who is having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham) behind the back of his beautician wife (Sharon Stone). Meanwhile, a young Diane (Lindsay Lohan) prepares to marry her classmate, William (Elijah Wood), in order to save him from going to Vietnam, and two collegiate campaigners for Senator Kennedy remove their ties to take their first LSD trip, courtesy of a resident hippie drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher). Though the sheer volume of characters--and celebrities portraying them--is often overwhelming, Estevez is deft at making each plot thread convincing and involving. Though BOBBY is not a biopic and will in no way be mistaken for the definitive statement on the man or his life and times, it is thoroughly adept at distilling both his message and the time in which he fought to deliver it. [More]
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood, Harry Belafonte, Nick Cannon, Emilio Estevez, Laurence Fishburne, Heather Graham, Helen Hunt, Ashton Kutcher, Shia LaBeouf, William H. Macy
Director: Emilio Estevez
Director: Emilio Estevez
Producer: Ed Bass, Holly Wiersma
Composer: Mark Isham
Studio: Weinstein Company
Reviews for Bobby
Star power alone pushes Bobby to a point where it's a comfortable failure,
has so many storylines that it becomes near impossible to give a flip about any particular one.
With so many movies winking and aiming for clever, Bobby arrives sopping wet with nostalgia and earnestness.
A Crash-like roundelay of desperately manufactured bathos that covers the entire spectrum of miserable plotting and characterization.
An exercise in historical revisionism for folks who would rather be informed of breaking national crises through news feeds on All My Children.
Written and directed by Emilio Estevez, Bobby is like an American-history textbook marked with thick yellow highlighter wherever a parallel might be detected between the Vietnam era and the reign of Bush II.
It's an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way.
Estevez probably could have cut the cast in half and come up with a richer, stronger film.
With Bobby, Emilo Estevez tries to link the intimate stories of nearly two dozen characters to a large and consequential public event the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Esteves's curious multi-strand film carries us to a quietly devastating conclusion.
Every frame is informed and fueled by Mr. Estevez’s impassioned mourning for a figure who came close to changing the course of American history. Bobby is exciting, involving and riveting.
Estevez means to eulogize the hopes of a nation, showing the night's impact on a group of hotel guests and staff cross-sectioned by age, race, and class. But his movie ends up buried under its stifling good intentions and dire execution.
Estevez proves himself as a capable filmmaker by combining actual footage and speeches by Kennedy with new material to create something stirring and memorable.
In the movie business, there's no such thing as 'truth in titling.' If there was, Bobby would be called A Bunch of Boring, No-Name, Cookie-Cutter Characters.
Bobby has a spectacular cast, and Estevez has another twist there: well-known, famous actors play unexpected roles, try 'something different.'
The movie has no real story to speak of, just a series of barely connected vignettes over the 24-hour period before RFK's demise, only some of which have anything to do with the ever-changing political climate of the early 1960s.
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