Simply Perfect

hyped garbage

Best movie of this year hands down!

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Bobby is a film written and directed by Emilio Estevez. The screenplay is a fictionalized account of the hours leading up to the June 5, 1968 shooting of United States Senator from New York and former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles following his win in the California Democratic Party primary for the 1968 Presidential Election.It has an all-star cast that includes Harry Belafonte,Nick Cannon,Emilio Estevez,Laurence Fishburne,Heather Graham,Anthony Hopkins,Helen Hunt,Joshua Jackson,Ashton Kutcher,Shia LaBeouf,Lindsay Lohan,William H. Macy,Demi Moore,Freddy Rodriguez,Martin Sheen,Christian Slater,Sharon Stone,Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Elijah Wood.Twenty-two people become unwitting participants in a tragic and defining moment of June in 1968, and the California presidential primary elections are occupying the minds of many in the Golden State, with Robert F. Kennedy in a close race against Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. The Kennedy campaign staff has set up camp at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, while the staff and guests become observers as the brother of fallen president John F. Kennedy sets out to pick up where his sibling left off. Paul (Macy) is the manager of the Ambassador, and his wife, Miriam (Stone), is a hairdresser who runs' the hotel's beauty salon. Angela (Graham) is a receptionist working the hotel's switchboard who has been sleeping with Paul behind Miriam's back. Timmons (Slater) is in charge of the hotel's restaurant and catering department, and makes no secret of his dislike of the African-Americans and Latinos under his employ. Miguel (Vargas) and Jose (Rodriguez) are two young Chicanos on the kitchen staff who have it in for Timmons, while Robinson (Fishburne) is an older black man who counsels them on dealing with their rage. Virginia Fallon (Moore) sings in the hotel's cocktail lounge and has a serious problem with alcohol; her husband, Tim (Estevez), is a Kennedy supporter and also her manager, and he's nearing the end of his rope in dealing with her problem. William (Wood) is a young man desperate to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam; Diane (Lohan) is a pretty young woman dating William's brother who agrees to marry him so William can avoid being drafted, though William is clearly infatuated with her, while she considers this a marriage in name only. John Casey (Hopkins) is one of the owners of the Ambassador, and Nelson (Belafonte) is an old friend who works at the hotel. And Jack (Sheen) is a wealthy Kennedy campaign financier who is married to Samantha (Hunt),an attractive but much younger woman.A labor of love from actor/writer/director Emilio Estevez, Bobby is a very well written, deftly directed and incredibly acted ensemble piece.Despite problems with its numerous subplots, the larger story of the times and the man are so compelling, and the actors here are so capable, that the movie succeeds.Finally,Estevez has done a terrific job a film that explores the lives of people who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the day that Robert Kennedy won the California primary and was shot to death.

Let me just preface this by saying I have never written a review for a movie on IMDb, and now I'm writing one for a movie that is six years old. That is how much Bobby, the man and the film, affected me.The only reason I decided to watch Bobby is because I have been researching and writing a book about my grandfather Robert E. Thompson, a Washington newsman. He was good friends with both Jack and Bobby Kennedy. So much so that Jack Kennedy made Pops his press secretary in 1958 when he ran for reelection to the Senate - two years before he became President - and in 1962 my grandfather, who had watched Bobby Kennedy's career flourish since they met in 1956 and was enamored by the man, published the first biography about him entitled 'Robert F. Kennedy: The Brother Within'. A year later he also witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.In writing my book I became overly familiar with the lives of not just both Kennedy's but the entire family and in many respects, in the process of so much scholarly research, I had stopped thinking about the emotional resonance of their message - especially Bobby's, the last hope. It's not something I realized until I watched this film. I wont get into the nonsensical elements of the plot except to say that what at first seemed unnecessary became forgotten in the emotional weight of the last 15 minutes.To watch the man campaign, watch the hope of America brighten after Vietnam, Civil Rights and MLK's murder and then to see it all come crashing down in one moment with the music tugging at the appropriate heart strings and the added knowledge that my grandfather had seen something in the man long before many others had was too much for me, I have never cried because of a movie but I can honestly say I was moved to tears. There is a book about him appropriately titled The Last Campaign. He really was our last hope, at least in that era. Instead of the hope for America we got angry little Tricky Dick Nixon, Republican cronyism and the haunting legacy of Watergate. Needless to say in this era of so-called leaders like Newt Gingrich it is important to keep the message alive that Kennedy and King and others were trying to spread, a message of love. Especially as we live through the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kennedy's Presidency. And in its own way this film does just that, I only wish I had seen it six years ago. Absolutely powerful.

In this production the director attempts to return us to the mood of the late 60s - an era where too many of us believed the improbable was the likely and the customary was the enemy. Estevez employs the technique of "look(ing) at things the way they {were}, and ask why" ... then dream of what never was but try to make it true on camera.The film is filled with fictional accounts of the invented lives of guests and employees at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles - "people com(ing), people go(ing), nothing ever happening" until the final moments of the film. Yet in this paean, the title character is treated so reverentially the role of Bobby remains uncast. Instead, Estevez uses news clips to establish mise-en-scène. Unlike the film's never identified shooter, the director misses.The film's only contrast is that it omits important historical facts in preference for the superfluous. Despite the film's buildup of election year hope in the fictional characters, we are not shown the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan's motive of despair or Bobby Kennedy's firm support of Israel during the Six-Day War and beyond. Despite the unacknowledged troop buildup in Vietnam by John Kennedy, the film hovers on Bobby's desire to remove those troops quickly. Despite the hope in RFK presented through the eyes of a young black "everyman" campaign worker, the film neglects to tell us that, while Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy issued a directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead of these historical relevancies we are treated to a view of how two of Kennedy's campaign workers would have looked if they had tried to play tennis while wearing business suits after dropping acid - more fiction.As Bobby in life, the film "Bobby" is full of hope but leaves us well short of its goal. Only one Bobby is blameless for this. 2 stars.

OK, so I gave it a "gentleman's seven." I saw this for the first time last night on TV and got confused from the beginning. It's billed as being about Robert F. Kennedy, hence the title "Bobby." But instead, it's about this one day in June 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. And from throughout the movie, I kept asking myself, "Who are these characters featured in the movie, why are they important, and when do we get to why I'm watching this movie in the first place?" I was a college student in Texas listening to the news that summer when Robert Kennedy was murdered in California. I was a high school student in Dallas, and the school's annual school book photographer, who took a memorable picture of President Kennedy shaking hands with the crowd at Love Field about 40 minutes before he was murdered.I really expected a tad more from this movie titled "Bobby." It just seems to be a way to get a lot of aging actors/actresses on the payroll.