Hey, I don't know if my opinion is EVIDENCE that the film is crap, just my opinion.
But the Academy may very well eat this up with a spoon. It's exactly the kind of pseudo-liberal historical film Hollywood will want to embrace (cause, y'know, it's about ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY! and his ASSASSINATION! and CIVIL RIGHTS! and VIETNAM!).
Plus, it's the type of pet project by an actor-turned-writer/director that friends in Hollywood like to reward. The only difference is that George Clooney is a very talented writer/director and Emilio Estevez is . . . um, not.
Bobby
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OscarGuy
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You've heard ONE opinion from one poster so far and you are already calling the film crap. Reviews have really not begin to come in but both Variety and Hollywood Reporter give it good reviews.
According to rottentomatoes, it's getting a better rating than Babel and an equal rating to Stranger Than Fiction.
We won't know more until critics start in. After all, Crash wasn't a hit with members of our board, yet it won...don't count it out just yet. Remember that Harvey got Chocolat nominated.
According to rottentomatoes, it's getting a better rating than Babel and an equal rating to Stranger Than Fiction.
We won't know more until critics start in. After all, Crash wasn't a hit with members of our board, yet it won...don't count it out just yet. Remember that Harvey got Chocolat nominated.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
Now that it is evident that Bobby is crap, please don't create any suspense about the famous actor whom you stood talking to. Who was it?Big Magilla wrote:I remember standing across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral talking to a famous actor during my lunch hour as other dignitaries gathered for his funeral.
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Big Magilla
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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. I remember waking up to the horrifying news that he had been assassinated and then watching his last speech played over and over on TV. I remember standing across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral talking to a famous actor during my lunch hour as other dignitaries gathered for his funeral. I remember having an office in the building next to the Ambassador Hotel when I moved to L.A. in early 1981 and walking through the hotel moments before learning that there had been an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. These memories are so vivid that any film recreating the events of the last 24 hours in his life would have to be really special.
Oddest Freudian question about the film is why Estevez cast ex-girl firend Moore as his wife and why she accepted instead of going for the, say, Sharon Stone role.
I remember Bobby Kennedy well - he was the great hope of the late sixties. I remember waking up to the horrifying news that he had been assassinated and then watching his last speech played over and over on TV. I remember standing across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral talking to a famous actor during my lunch hour as other dignitaries gathered for his funeral. I remember having an office in the building next to the Ambassador Hotel when I moved to L.A. in early 1981 and walking through the hotel moments before learning that there had been an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. These memories are so vivid that any film recreating the events of the last 24 hours in his life would have to be really special.
Oddest Freudian question about the film is why Estevez cast ex-girl firend Moore as his wife and why she accepted instead of going for the, say, Sharon Stone role.
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The Original BJ
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Bobby isn't this year's Crash. Nope, the Haggis film was a lousy movie people took way too seriously. Bobby, on the other hand, belongs at the Razzies. I will gladly endure a Little Miss Sunshine Oscar sweep if it means Emilio Estevez and Co. stay far away from the ceremony.
The screenplay is simply terrible. The characters in this movie spout dialogue so ridiculous I can only partially blame the cast for their lousy performances (with a hideous Demi Moore beating them all for Worst in Show.) Oh, they're not ALL bad, but Moore, Helen Hunt, and Mr. Demi Moore certainly are.
Then there's the film's anachronistic feel. Good Night, and Good Luck expertly made parallels to our current political era without feeling heavy-handed, but Bobby loads on lame references to things like voting chads that my audience found inexplicably hilarious. I found it stupid. And note to Emilio Estevez: extended sequences of young men tripping on LSD are not automatically funny. (Though Estevez apparently took the hint on "White Rabbit," as it's been removed from the film.)
THEN there's the film's adherence to what I call Forrest Gump History, painting a portrait of the past that SEEMS to advance liberal politics (ain't it great that RFK wanted to help the brown men?), but only uses this veneer to mask its deeply reactionary agenda (the film subtly - or not so subtly, depending on your tolerance for Crash-like racial b.s. - affirms the subservience of the Black and Hispanic characters).
Emilio Estevez seems like a nice man (he attended the screening and did a Q&A), and he clearly adores Bobby Kennedy (though to know that, all you'd need to do is watch the final moments of the film, in which an endless Kennedy speech reinforces the not so complex notion that RFK was in fact, The Second Coming.) Estevez described Bobby as a picture in the "great" disaster film tradition of Irwin Allen (citing both The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure as influences). I think it's pretty telling that his point of reference wasn't the great ensemble film tradition of Altman.
The screenplay is simply terrible. The characters in this movie spout dialogue so ridiculous I can only partially blame the cast for their lousy performances (with a hideous Demi Moore beating them all for Worst in Show.) Oh, they're not ALL bad, but Moore, Helen Hunt, and Mr. Demi Moore certainly are.
Then there's the film's anachronistic feel. Good Night, and Good Luck expertly made parallels to our current political era without feeling heavy-handed, but Bobby loads on lame references to things like voting chads that my audience found inexplicably hilarious. I found it stupid. And note to Emilio Estevez: extended sequences of young men tripping on LSD are not automatically funny. (Though Estevez apparently took the hint on "White Rabbit," as it's been removed from the film.)
THEN there's the film's adherence to what I call Forrest Gump History, painting a portrait of the past that SEEMS to advance liberal politics (ain't it great that RFK wanted to help the brown men?), but only uses this veneer to mask its deeply reactionary agenda (the film subtly - or not so subtly, depending on your tolerance for Crash-like racial b.s. - affirms the subservience of the Black and Hispanic characters).
Emilio Estevez seems like a nice man (he attended the screening and did a Q&A), and he clearly adores Bobby Kennedy (though to know that, all you'd need to do is watch the final moments of the film, in which an endless Kennedy speech reinforces the not so complex notion that RFK was in fact, The Second Coming.) Estevez described Bobby as a picture in the "great" disaster film tradition of Irwin Allen (citing both The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure as influences). I think it's pretty telling that his point of reference wasn't the great ensemble film tradition of Altman.
From Slant Magazine:
* out of ****
Anyone looking for this year's Crash will find it in Emilio Estevez's Bobby, a reimagining of the day in which Robert F. Kennedy's assassination at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968 struck a major blow to future-seeking Democrats and liberals the nation over. A dry take on an Oliver Stone panorama by way of The Love Boat, it shares several attributes with Paul Haggis's race drama of last year: starry cast peppered with A-, B-, and C-listers all putting on brave faces, gut-churningly awful exposition that reeks more of screenwriting software than actual human utterances, and the purport of "importance"—you know, the kind of movie where everyone feels like a better American after having seen it. And it's also going to be the type of film this season where certain people's ulcers flare up at the very mention of it, while others try, try, try to convince them of its worth.
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. Among our contestants, err, performers in the Ambassador Hotel Sweepstakes are its manager (William H. Macy), who's married to a mod hairdresser (Sharon Stone) but secretly screwing a building phone gal (Heather Graham), his food and beverage supervisor (Christian Slater), who callously dismisses his mostly black and Latino staff in the kitchen, one of which (Freddy Rodriguez) is a bright-eyed baseball fan whose aw-shucks demeanor wouldn't be out of place on Leave it to Beaver. Guests at the hotel include boozy chanteuse Virginia Fallon (Razzie-worthy Demi Moore) and husband Tim (Estevez himself), who's fed up with her diva bullshit, a young lass (Lindsay Lohan) who marries a good friend (Elijah Wood) to spare him from the draft, and a couple that mostly stays in discussing ladies' shoes and relationships (Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt). And there's the two geezers (Harry Belafonte and Anthony Hopkins) who play chess in the main lobby and talk of the days of old. Basically, all mark time until the final scenes, when Sirhan Sirhan (whose face we don't even really get to see, per Estevez's genius idea to keep him as vague as possible) unloads in the hotel kitchen, and we wonder who will get plugged with lead in the end.
This is not Estevez's first politically-fused effort, for that you have to go back to the hilariously overwrought 1996 fiasco The War at Home, where he directed himself as a conflicted Vietnam vet (try not to belly laugh when hearing the soft-voiced Estevez constantly bellow the word "gooks"). But every film he's made since then is terrible (including Wisdom, Men at Work, and Rated X), and even with some very capable actors, he still cannot drag any movie out of the mud. The best of Bobby's lot is Slater, who by default has the most interesting character as the casually racist F&B guy, but the film, of course, has to try to justify his every move. Heaven forbid someone had more than one definable trait. Stone does her usual spurned and serious act, and her big scene with Moore is bungled because of the latter's inability to act one iota; Laurence Fishburne dispels black wisdom over fruit cobbler (which surprisingly none of the cast barfs up given the obnoxious dialogue he has to deliver); and Hopkins continues his streak of outrageously lazy performances in what could have been a sensitively rendered supporting character. But the real low point is Ashton Kutcher's hippie dealer, and the two volunteer dipshits (Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty) who take LSD and open their minds, man. All scored to, yup, Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which I thought everyone in Hollywood, Earth, or the solar system knew was well past a cliché to use during these sorts of scenes.
But then again, Estevez leaves no other cliché unturned, so it's hard to imagine him embracing originality. And when he runs out of those, he tacks on a very lengthy end sequence of a famous RFK speech, which encapsulates everything the movie desperately has been trying to say throughout its previous 100-odd minutes. At that rate, why not just show a blank screen with audiotape? After enduring this wretched twaddle, you'll be praying for that blank screen, the same one that seemingly resides in the writer-director's head.
* out of ****
Anyone looking for this year's Crash will find it in Emilio Estevez's Bobby, a reimagining of the day in which Robert F. Kennedy's assassination at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968 struck a major blow to future-seeking Democrats and liberals the nation over. A dry take on an Oliver Stone panorama by way of The Love Boat, it shares several attributes with Paul Haggis's race drama of last year: starry cast peppered with A-, B-, and C-listers all putting on brave faces, gut-churningly awful exposition that reeks more of screenwriting software than actual human utterances, and the purport of "importance"—you know, the kind of movie where everyone feels like a better American after having seen it. And it's also going to be the type of film this season where certain people's ulcers flare up at the very mention of it, while others try, try, try to convince them of its worth.
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. Among our contestants, err, performers in the Ambassador Hotel Sweepstakes are its manager (William H. Macy), who's married to a mod hairdresser (Sharon Stone) but secretly screwing a building phone gal (Heather Graham), his food and beverage supervisor (Christian Slater), who callously dismisses his mostly black and Latino staff in the kitchen, one of which (Freddy Rodriguez) is a bright-eyed baseball fan whose aw-shucks demeanor wouldn't be out of place on Leave it to Beaver. Guests at the hotel include boozy chanteuse Virginia Fallon (Razzie-worthy Demi Moore) and husband Tim (Estevez himself), who's fed up with her diva bullshit, a young lass (Lindsay Lohan) who marries a good friend (Elijah Wood) to spare him from the draft, and a couple that mostly stays in discussing ladies' shoes and relationships (Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt). And there's the two geezers (Harry Belafonte and Anthony Hopkins) who play chess in the main lobby and talk of the days of old. Basically, all mark time until the final scenes, when Sirhan Sirhan (whose face we don't even really get to see, per Estevez's genius idea to keep him as vague as possible) unloads in the hotel kitchen, and we wonder who will get plugged with lead in the end.
This is not Estevez's first politically-fused effort, for that you have to go back to the hilariously overwrought 1996 fiasco The War at Home, where he directed himself as a conflicted Vietnam vet (try not to belly laugh when hearing the soft-voiced Estevez constantly bellow the word "gooks"). But every film he's made since then is terrible (including Wisdom, Men at Work, and Rated X), and even with some very capable actors, he still cannot drag any movie out of the mud. The best of Bobby's lot is Slater, who by default has the most interesting character as the casually racist F&B guy, but the film, of course, has to try to justify his every move. Heaven forbid someone had more than one definable trait. Stone does her usual spurned and serious act, and her big scene with Moore is bungled because of the latter's inability to act one iota; Laurence Fishburne dispels black wisdom over fruit cobbler (which surprisingly none of the cast barfs up given the obnoxious dialogue he has to deliver); and Hopkins continues his streak of outrageously lazy performances in what could have been a sensitively rendered supporting character. But the real low point is Ashton Kutcher's hippie dealer, and the two volunteer dipshits (Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty) who take LSD and open their minds, man. All scored to, yup, Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which I thought everyone in Hollywood, Earth, or the solar system knew was well past a cliché to use during these sorts of scenes.
But then again, Estevez leaves no other cliché unturned, so it's hard to imagine him embracing originality. And when he runs out of those, he tacks on a very lengthy end sequence of a famous RFK speech, which encapsulates everything the movie desperately has been trying to say throughout its previous 100-odd minutes. At that rate, why not just show a blank screen with audiotape? After enduring this wretched twaddle, you'll be praying for that blank screen, the same one that seemingly resides in the writer-director's head.
Czech Republic, Slovakia (for a weekend), Austria (Vienna for a day), Spain...oh, and Gibraltar.Reza wrote:By the way which other countries did you visit apart from Turkey?
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Does whizzing through the Milan train station constitute a visit to this city?Penelope wrote:...does spending several hours (4 different days) at Milan's airport count as visiting Italy?
In 2002 I spent a heavenly 10 days in Italy. Got to visit Rome, Naples, Capri, Sorrento, Florence, Pisa, Verona and Venice. We then took the train to Paris and it went through Milan, without stopping, in the middle of the night. I did stay up hoping to catch a glimpse of the Duomo through the train window. Ofcourse it was wishful thinking on my part as none of the sights of the city were anywhere near the train tracks. At least I have a reason to visit this great country again.
By the way which other countries did you visit apart from Turkey?
Reza, I'm afraid that I have returned to the US; the original objective for going to Europe did not pan out as I had wished, but at least I got to see 6 countries during the last month...well, 5 and 1/16th of a country...does spending several hours (4 different days) at Milan's airport count as visiting Italy?
And just for fun, my favorite song of the year. I only wish American pop music was this much fun.
Now, on to the Oscars....
And just for fun, my favorite song of the year. I only wish American pop music was this much fun.
Now, on to the Oscars....
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Practically every review I've read has singled out Sharon Stone for excellence--even the International Herald Tribune differentiated her from the rest of the cast, saying she "completely transforms herself." I say she's definitely in the running for a nomination.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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VanHelsing
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Bobby looks like it's gonna be a serious contender. So far, the reviews have been very positive. I have a feeling it's this year's GNGL & Crash combined - political film directed by an actor and the cast is HUGE, even bigger than Crash.
So who's gonna be this year's Matt Dillon? Either Stone or Moore has a chance, it seems.
So who's gonna be this year's Matt Dillon? Either Stone or Moore has a chance, it seems.
With a Southern accent...
"Don't you dare lie to me!" and...
"You threaten my congeniality, you threaten me!"
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"You shouldn't be doing what you're doing. The truth is enough!"
"Are you and Perry?" ... "Please, Nelle."
"Don't you dare lie to me!" and...
"You threaten my congeniality, you threaten me!"
-------
"You shouldn't be doing what you're doing. The truth is enough!"
"Are you and Perry?" ... "Please, Nelle."
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Sonic Youth
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Damien wrote:But the reviews make it sound highly intriguing, and now it's up there with The Black Dahlia and The Hottest State as one of my most anticipated fall releases.
On that note, I don't suppose reviews will temper your anticipation for The Hottest State, will it?
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
I had seen some clips from the picture a few days ago and it looked pretty cheesey, like a Rod Lurie movie, and with the cast consisting primarily of actors a bit past their time I figured it was gonna be negligible junk. But the reviews make it sound highly intriguing, and now it's up there with The Black Dahlia and The Hottest State as one of my most anticipated fall releases.Mister Tee wrote:This film wasn't even on my C-list of best picture possibilities. But the combination of this trifecta of good trade reviews and Harvey Weinstein's involvement shoots it, improbably, to near the top of the charts. Barring a far more negative response from critics in Toronto, I think we have to consider the eerie possibility of an Emilio Estevez directing nomination.
"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