Bobby

Reza
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Post by Reza »

LA Times
Getting out the vote for 'Bobby'

Harvey Weinstein, the buzz master, keeps his eyes on the Oscar prize.

By Robert W. Welkos
Times Staff Writer

January 13, 2007

For a movie that has grossed only $11 million, been panned by half the nation's film critics and is now almost gone from the local megaplexes, one might think that "Bobby" faces an insurmountable climb if it is to capture Academy Awards attention.

But that doesn't take into account another familiar name: Harvey.

Fueled by a Golden Globe nomination for best dramatic film ­ competing against "The Departed," "The Queen," "Babel" and "Little Children" ­ and a Screen Actors Guild nomination for best ensemble cast, Harvey Weinstein, the distributor of "Bobby" and arguably the godfather of Oscar campaigning, has gone to the whip as the Academy Awards race heads into the far turn.

The film may not be hogging as much airtime as "The Queen" has been doing of late (with its incessant ads proclaiming Princess Diana is dead) but Weinstein has sprung for a new round of "Bobby" commercials on shows including "Today," "Good Morning America" and "Larry King Live" as well as local news programs in Los Angeles and New York City, where most Oscar voters live. Newspapers and Hollywood trades have also brimmed with "Bobby" ads.

The "Bobby" awards campaign is not only relying on the marketing savvy of Weinstein, it's hoping that Hollywood's acting community favors the film's huge ensemble cast in much the same way SAG did last year with "Crash," an ensemble film that went on to win the Academy Award for best picture.

"When 'Crash' won best ensemble cast [at last year's SAG Awards], it moved into head-to-head competition with 'Brokeback Mountain,' " said Murray Weissman, who is part of the "Bobby" Oscar campaign team. " … Suddenly, 'Bobby' is nominated for a Golden Globe and then picks up an ensemble cast nomination from SAG just like 'Crash' did last year and Harvey sees something. He's not going to surrender."

Weissman admitted that the film had been "sagging" after critics weighed in, but said that it resonates with rank-and-file audiences.

Directed, written by and costarring Emilio Estevez, "Bobby" uses fictional characters and subplots mixed with real-life archival footage of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to dramatize the hours leading up to his assassination in 1968. The cast includes Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen and Lindsay Lohan.

The awards campaign for "Bobby" is not unlike previous campaigns Weinstein mounted when he ran Miramax Films. The steady stream of commercials and newspaper ads is designed to keep "Bobby" in the game.

Although some critics may not have been won over by the film, audiences stood and applauded at film festivals in Toronto; Venice, Italy; and Deauville, France.

"The film speaks for itself ­ it doesn't need any other comment," said Edward Bass, one of the film's producers.

"Harvey approaches the value of nominations and awards differently than major studios do," said veteran entertainment attorney David Colden. "I think he sees value in the nominations alone ­ not merely in wins. I think he views it as increasing the value of his pictures, vis-à-vis the ancillary market, the nontheatrical market. I'm not sure the major studios have that same mind-set."

In the world of Oscar campaigning, publicity is as important as industry screenings and full-page ads for a film. And with its star-studded cast, "Bobby" can count on the paparazzi to turn out in force whenever those actors turn out for an event.

Cameras were flashing Tuesday evening when Sheen and wife Janet hosted a packed cocktail party at Drago in Santa Monica for their son, Estevez, celebrating his film's Golden Globe and SAG nominations.

The Sheen family has many friends in Hollywood. Along with stars of "Bobby," the party drew industry veterans such as actors Martin Landau, Lou Gossett Jr., Lainie Kazan and Beau Bridges, along with director Arthur Hiller and producers Mike Medavoy and Mace Neufeld. (Weinstein could not attend, a spokeswoman said).

The following day, the media were invited to Paramount Pictures, where "Bobby" had a screening for members of the Dodgers, including club owners Frank and Jamie McCourt, and Ann Meyers Drysdale, the widow of the late pitching great Don Drysdale. The reason? The film includes footage in which Kennedy salutes Drysdale, who'd scored a big victory on the evening Kennedy was celebrating winning the California Democratic presidential nomination.

"I want to first express my high regard to Don Drysdale, who pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight, and I hope that we have as good fortune in our campaign," Kennedy told the crowd at the Ambassador Hotel shortly before he left the podium and was mortally wounded by assassin Sirhan Sirhan.

Some of the film's most potent scenes are of Kennedy speaking and then making his way into the pantry of the hotel where he would meet his fate.

For older academy voters, who still vividly remember Kennedy and that turbulent period in American politics, "Bobby" may strike a chord that isn't felt by younger people. That could help the movie's chances, since many Oscar voters are over 50.

But even in Hollywood, where the Kennedy mystique and liberal-leaning politics remain strong, "Bobby" is a dark horse.

" 'Bobby' always seemed like a longshot," said Brandon Gray, president of online box office tracking site Box Office Mojo. "Maybe the [SAG and Golden Globe] nominations can be attributed to the campaign of the people behind the movie … but whether the campaign will merit an actual Academy Award nomination for the picture remains to be seen."


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robert.welkos@latimes.com
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Post by Sabin »

If 'Bobby' is nominated for Best Picture (and the only praise I can allot it is that it's an Oprah movie all the way, so I suppose it could happen) it will be the worst Best Picture nominee of my lifetime. Most of yours too. Unconscionable, this ####ing thing. Unconscionable. In a way, it reminds me of 'The Da Vinci Code' where there is such repulsive subject-worship that the creators forget to do justice to their material and subsequently no choice is made other than a pat on the back. When almost every performance is mannered, monotone, and vaguely inhuman, alien almost (Sharon Stone and Joshua Jackson are competent, Shia LaBouf (sp?) is as well) and the style is derived soullessly from other movies, there is nobody to blame but the director, who one would imagine is either idly on retainer or just doesn't care to dig into the screenplay deep enough to find something interesting.

The screenwriting is even worse. Good intentions, my ass. I take dumps with good intentions and I have the common sense to keep it to myself. Every scene is the same: entrance, non-sequitur greeting, followed by a half page speech that lands with an ungodly thud, empty stares, repeat. And these speeches are among the worst written I've ever encountered. Jan DeBont movie-bad. Michael Bay movie-bad. Uwe Boll-movie bad. I have never heard humans to speak as such and Emilio the Director has nothing to offer his walking props past anything beyond the automiton performance he himself delivers. Poor Mark Isham, stuck having to ladel syrup onto the procedings; how else to find ebb and flow to the same scene for two hours?

'Bobby' is the worst movie of the year. I hated every minute. For Oscar completists only, as it's bound to get one or two. To bemoan Emilio's good intentions is as much bullshit as the promise of peace with honor.
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Post by criddic3 »

Damien wrote:
criddic3 wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Ted Kennedy first elected in 1962, which would make his re-elecion bid for 1968? Or was he running in 1964 because he was appointed in 1962?

Teddy won a special election in '62 to complete his brother's term. He was re-elected in 1964 for a full 6-year term.
That's what I thought but wasn't sure. Thanks. Boy, over forty years and counting . . . (sigh)
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Post by dws1982 »

This was pretty bad. It probably could've been hilarious if you're in the right mood, but I wasn't in that kind of mood. (The guys on the row behind me were though.) I was actually sick and left the theater twice (but only missed about five minutes of the movie), so I thought maybe that had hurt my perception of the movie. But my dad didn't like it any more than I did.

Penelope is right that this plays like an episode of Hotel. Tonally it's all over the place--mostly soap opera, but also part political drama, part Crash ripoff, and part stoner comedy--and the various plots are either embarassing (the stoner plot) or dull (most everything else). Two hours makes it feel both overlong and too short--it should've been either thirty minutes (which would've cut right to the chase of what the movie pretends to be about) or twelve hours (which would've fleshed out the characters beyond a few cursory character traits--obsession over finding the perfect shoes, troubled marriages, fear of Vietnam).

There's not much compensation in the acting. Most of the actors don't register at all (although: Razzies for Demi and Ashton!); It's really a lazily acted movie--most of the actors kind of just say their lines with little expression or emotion; Anthony Hopkins and William H. Macy are especially lifeless. There are two exceptions to this though: Sharon Stone manages to make her character something more than just a wronged wife, and creates one of the only characters in the movie who seems to have a believable existence outside of the movie. If it gets an Oscar nomination in any category, I think she'd be the most deserving. The other is Joshua Jackson as a campaign worker. On the episodes I saw of Dawson's Creek, his character was little more than an unbearable snark fest, and the screenplay tries to do the same thing to this character at some points, but Jackson doesn't give in. I'll put it this way: The theme of the movie seems to be how Bobby Kennedy was the last hope of the 60's, the one person who might be able to bring the country together after all of the racial turmoil and after Vietnam. The non-newsreel footage of the movie focuses too much on the soap opera to ever bring this theme across, but Jackson pulls it off and without his work (especially in the last half), we might get the impression that the assassination was just the Shocking! Finale! to a Very Special Episode of Hotel.
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Post by Damien »

Amusing review from the Boston Globe:

Casting about earnestly
Director Estevez gets lost in crowd in 'Bobby'
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff | November 23, 2006

With the deeply earnest dinner-theater production that calls itself "Bobby," actor-writer-director Emilio Estevez has tried to make a movie in the fashion of the lateRobert Altman . The problem is that he's not Robert Altman. Not to be unkind, but he's not even close. He's made a pretty good remake of "Airport," though.

Yet "Nashville" is very much on the filmmaker's mind, and the movie wants to be an ambitious generational statement and a testament to the loss of American innocence, as well as a means of casting everybody in Estevez' s Treo . Focusing on one day in the life of a Los Angeles hotel -- The Ambassador, where Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the night of June 4, 1968 -- "Bobby" is a cry of sociopolitical agony that shoots itself in the foot on a scene-by-scene basis.

Bobby Kennedy doesn't appear in the film, other than in news footage and as a distant, blurry figure during the climactic scenes, but at least half of the characters milling about the Ambassador are obsessed with him. The California Democratic primary is being held this hot summer day and the candidate is neck and neck with Eugene McCarthy. Kennedy volunteers pack into buses in the parking lot, fanning out across the City of Angels. Reverend King is dead, the war in Vietnam lurches on, and Bobby represents the last great hope of Camelot.

Two of the campaign workers, played engagingly by Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty, decide to play hooky and drop acid. The hotel's general manager (William H. Macy) is cheating on his wife (Sharon Stone) with one of the switchboard operators (Heather Graham). A young Mexican busboy (Freddy Rodriguez) has tickets to see Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale possibly beat the all-time record for shutouts, but the racist kitchen manager (Christian Slater) has everyone working double-shifts. Down in the chapel, a teenage girl (Lindsay Lohan) is marrying a classmate she hardly knows (Elijah Wood) to keep him out of the war.

And so it goes: Estevez probably thinks he's giving us entertainment value with this we-are-the-world casting approach, but while the performances are mostly solid -- Stone in particular is tremendously moving, even subtle -- the strategy backfires. It's impossible to emotionally invest in the characters when there's another Hollywood Square around every corner. Look, there's Anthony Hopkins as the retired doorman! Nick Cannon as a Kennedy campaign worker! Martin Sheen as a hotel visitor and Helen Hunt as his aging, neurotic trophy wife! Laurence Fishburne as the head chef!

At times the movie approaches the heights reserved for true camp: The sight of Demi Moore, as the hotel's Scotch-addled lounge singer, slurring "We're allll whores -- only some of us get paid for it," is enough to wake the ghost of Joan Crawford. The less said about the actress' husband, Ashton Kutcher, as a blissed-out hippie drug dealer, the better. Given the film's subject and how much of his heart Estevez has obviously put into it, you may feel ashamed for occasionally howling into your popcorn. As with a freeway pileup, though, it's hard to look away.

"Bobby" is well-shot and edited; Mark Isham's score evokes the requisite sense of tragedy without losing its cool. (The period pop songs, by contrast, have been chosen for maximum cliche.) On the craft level, the movie's a professional piece of work.

Estevez's script is another matter: ham-handed and TV-movie flat, it states the obvious, then states it again and again and again. "Bobby" gets some of the racial politics right -- the jostling of the Mexicans and blacks in the kitchen for mutual respect and greater power -- but everyone else speaks in platitudes and bald subtext. Discoursing on his grandmother's blueberry cobbler recipe, Fishburne's chef could be speaking for the director when he says "I couldn't get the balance. I was forcing it. I couldn't find the poetry; I couldn't find the light."

"Bobby" isn't poetry but doggerel made with the best of intentions, and if you cherish the Kennedy mythos and pine for the loss of public idealism, maybe you'll fall for it. At the end, after all the shooting, Estevez goes for artistic broke with a montage of '60s news footage scored to -- wait for it -- Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence"; we also hear the campaign speech RFK gave earlier in 1968, in which he holds out an intensely moving vision of American reconciliation.

The sequence overreaches and lands straight in the banal, yet the words go straight to your heart. "Bobby" wants us to mourn "the once and future king" and meditate on what might have been, and maybe there's a movie someone should make -- an alternate history of the last 40 years, without Watergate and everything that came after. Estevez treats Bobby as a fallen god and expects we will too. Given the current state of the nation, maybe he's not asking too much.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Post by Damien »

criddic3 wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Ted Kennedy first elected in 1962, which would make his re-elecion bid for 1968? Or was he running in 1964 because he was appointed in 1962?
Teddy won a special election in '62 to complete his brother's term. He was re-elected in 1964 for a full 6-year term.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Post by criddic3 »

a carpetbagger simply to run for Senate in 1964 (brother Teddy was running for re-election in Massachusetts, so THAT was out).
--Damien

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Ted Kennedy first elected in 1962, which would make his re-elecion bid for 1968? Or was he running in 1964 because he was appointed in 1962?
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Post by Penelope »

Our annual Thanksgiving Day selection was this near-turkey. It certainly isn't the triumph Emilio and Harvey were hoping for, and it isn't the camp classic I was hoping for, though it comes nearer the latter thanks to the sight of a drunken Demi Moore, wearing a massive wig, huskily singing/slurring a slow version of "Louie Louie."

The film's deficiencies are all due to Estevez's script, which is banal in the extreme. The stories he's created for the large cast aren't all that interesting; it doesn't come off as The Love Boat, but, rather, that 80s semi-soap, Hotel, with an assassination for its denouement.

And although Estevez's direction is really no more than perfunctory, the movie looks marvelous: if ever there was movie worth the price of admission for its costumes, hair, make-up and sets, Bobby is it--and all of it beautifully photographed by cinematographer Michael Barrett.

Aside from Moore's eye-rolling perf, only two actors manage to make a strong impact, creating genuine human beings with depth: Freddy Rodriguez as a frustrated waiter (though my response may be due to the warm feeling he creates in my loins); and Sharon Stone, who really IS good here, and, yep, she has a Lee Grant/Voyage of the Damned haircutting moment, only in reverse.
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Post by flipp525 »

Damien wrote:Bobby's worshipful what-iffing calls to mind nothing so much as A.E. Housman: "Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honours out/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man."

Speaking of Housman, has anyone ever read or seen Tom Stoppard's play "The Invention of Love" which chronicles A.E. Housman's struggle with homosexuality and artistic creation? I saw the original production in London in 1998 and it was fantastic. It really makes you appreciate the beauty of the line cited by this Village Voice reporter.

I love the star-studded Airport/Voyage of the Damned-like feel of Bobby, too. Can we get a 'Lee Grant cutting off her hair in chunks'-like scene as well? Bring on the camp! Demi Moore's diva-esque performance alone should be getting me in the theater.

Sharon Stone's sounding like a real contender in supporting.
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Post by Reza »

If it's as campy as it sounds, I'll be first in line at the first day's showing!
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Post by 99-1100896887 »

Love it.
C.
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Post by Damien »

This Village Voice review convinces me Bobby is going to be a major player at this year's Academy Awards:

WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
With star-studded hero porn, Emilio Estevez blames the ills of the world on RFK's murder, but what about the man?

by Jim Ridley
November 14th

For progressives lifted, however temporarily, by the swell of a turning tide, Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is—an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Juggling some 22 main characters on June 4, 1968, in the hours leading up to RFK's speech at the Ambassador Hotel and its tragic after-math, ambitious actor-writer-director Emilio 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.

It falls to gentlemanly doorman Anthony Hopkins to acknowledge Bobby's model, the prototypical subplot-a-palooza Grand Hotel—a stroke that screenwriter Estevez handles with characteristic subtlety. "Grand hotel," the doorman says, adding helpfully: "It's a line from the old Greta Garbo movie, Grand Hotel." { LMAO Oh my God, this is going to be a camp classic!}

As Estevez practically builds the Ambassador a new wing to accommodate his subplots—finding vacancies for a self-sacrificing war bride (Lindsay Lohan!), a boozy nightclub singer (Demi Moore!), and even his dad, Martin Sheen—his attempt to hit every generational touchstone turns the movie into a docent's tour of '60s discord. If someone mentions a movie, it will be The Graduate; if someone takes LSD, the soundtrack will blare Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man. If someone mentions art, it will be to disparage the painting they bought of a soup can, yuk yuk.

All this retrophilia is turned into camp by a veritable telethon of celebrity walk-ons. Actors barge in like nosy neighbors borrowing cups of sugar. At the door—who could that soldier be? Why, hello, Elijah Wood!

Estevez's on-the-nose direction boldfaces contemporary parallels that might have been alarming and illuminating, if they hadn't been superimposed so blatantly on the material. Take the voter registration coordinator who explains the ballots, carefully pointing out "what the folks down at IBM like to call 'chads.' {I said it before, and I'll say it again. Oh my God, this is going to be a camp classic!}" Or the spelled-out references to an unpopular current war. It may be, given Hollywood's timidity about anything political, that the only way Estevez could get a movie made about the state of the union in 2006 was to set it in 1968. But he flattens his noble intent with a sledgehammer.

As awful as Bobby is, there's never a moment its maker doesn't brave the derision of cynics, and in a few scenes—for example, the well-played exchanges between Joshua Jackson's comradely campaign coordinator and Nick Cannon's true-believer volunteer—it evokes the hope that many Americans feel briefly rekindled and even more quickly doused every four years. As for the shooting, Estevez treats it as the snuffing of an entire alternate future—an America untangled from Vietnam, untainted by Watergate, and untroubled by racial friction.

In interviews Estevez has mentioned meeting Kennedy as a toddler. The movie regards the candidate from the same mythic distance—as the back of a head, or a heroic blur. But doing so robs the actual Robert F. Kennedy of his complexity. Bobby's closing montage uses a recording of an eloquent speech Kennedy made after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—a man whom Kennedy, not five years earlier, had authorized the FBI to wiretap while serving as his brother's pit bull attorney general. We'll never find out whether Bobby Kennedy would have become another Lincoln. Nor will he disappoint us with a long, sad decline into political careerism. Kennedy cited Aeschylus to eulogize King, but Bobby's worshipful what-iffing calls to mind nothing so much as A.E. Housman: "Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honours out/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man."
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Post by Big Magilla »

He was complicated. He can't escape the stench of having worked for McCarthy, but his liberal bent became well established as Attorney General.

I remember the carpetbagger debate, but as I recall it was mostly put forward by the Repblicans. New York Democrats were only too happy to have an electable Senator after years of a Repbulcian chokehold on both Senate seats as well as the Governorship.

True, he didn't jump into the Presidential race until he was confident he could win, but if he hadn't been assassinated there might never have been a Nixon presidency and all that followed.

Whether the film is any good or not, whether the public embraces it or not, it's nice to see his name associated with something other than another Marilyn Monroe murder conspiracy theory.
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Post by Damien »

Big Magilla wrote:It's beginning to sound like the crap I had first feared it would be.

I remember Bobby Kennedy well - he was the great hope of the late sixties.

For the sake of historical accuracy: While he was alive, a lot of people -- even liberals -- couldn't stand Bobby Kennedy. He was seen as a ruthless opportunist, who moved to New York as a carpetbagger simply to run for Senate in 1964 (brother Teddy was running for re-election in Massachusetts, so THAT was out). Similarly, he only got into the Presidential race after Gene McCarthy surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary indicated that President Johnson was vulnerable.

Plus he was counsel to Joe McCarthy's anti-civil libertarean witch hunt sub-committee in the 1950s, sort of a Poor Man's Roy Cohn.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Post by Penelope »

Whatever. Any movie that cites The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno as its source of inspiration has me first in line! Surely, there's some camp classic possibilities with this director and this cast.
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