Bobby

This film was surprisingly good. By "surprisingly", I mean, considering it was Emilio Estevez's project. The last film project of his I was aware of was "Men at Work", a forgettable film featuring himself and brother Charlie Sheen as a pair of fun-loving garbagemen. And I think the last I'd noticed anything of his career was when he was getting squished in an elevator shaft in Mission Impossible (not to be confused with either of the two sequels, all of which had identical plots).

Anyway, "Bobby" is a slice of life/ensemble film about a number of people at the Ambassador hotel in California on the day of the California primary in 1968, aka the day Bobby Kennedy was shot and the last day that an idealistic liberal had a shot at the White House, as far as I can tell.

I was just a few months old at the time. A lot of people cite it as the year idealism died in America.

Perhaps that's a bit melodramatic.

Anyway, the ensemble cast was pretty good. Some of the characters seemed a bit extraneous. I couldn't quite figure out what Anthony Hopkins was doing in the picture. But I suppose that was the point of his character. Some of the actors were notably good. WH Macy was excellent as usual, but I thought Sharon Stone was unusually good playing his wife. I think the movie was somewhat stolen by youngsters Shia Lebouef and Brian Geraghty, who play a pair of RFK volunteers who decide to play hooky on the door-to-door knocking and instead drop acid. I think this was the first Lindsay Lohan film I've seen: she was very good. I hope she doesn't waste her talent hanging around no-talents named Spears and Hilton. (To be fair, Britney Spears has a reasonable amount of talent - it's just not at singing. And I don't think she's clever enough to get away with having a career as a singer with that holding her back. But I digress.)

Anyway, there's not much more to say about the film. Ensemble films tend to suffer from being hard to sum up in a short blurb. In this case, the way to sum it up was to say that all of the characters seemed to be really deeply hurt by the shooting. I may be projecting here, though.

I think I'll read up on the assassination. Seems strange that RFK's entourage was ushered through the kitchen of all places. Doesn't it? I guess that was the quickest way out. But again, the security sucked, didn't it?

Update:
Yeah, this smells like another bad shooting.

I wonder if we'll ever have the proof about the Kennedy assassinations? Now that Howard Hunt has died, perhaps the truth will out?

Nah!