If Bobby causes us to stop and compare what might have been to the leadership we currently have, one suspects Estevez would not mind at all.
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.
Runtime: 2 hrs
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Nov 17, 2006 Limited
Box Office: $11,098,707
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
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Reviews for Bobby
Estevez doesn't seem to have anything to offer beyond a sweet, unquestioning admiration of RFK and the history homework he obviously did about the trappings of the time.
A daring, messy and strangely rewarding patchwork that's straining at the seams.
An earnest film that shows an advance in Estevez's filmmaking technique, but one that--given its setting--seems curiously shallow, even trivial.
For the last four decades of racism, sexism and any other ism, we, apparently, have only an assassin to blame.
Bobby shows how some people's problems become small and insignificant in the face of momentous events. But in so doing, the movie reveals itself to be small and insignificant, too.
Featuring 22 characters in a movie leaves little time to explore their subplots, and since they're played by A-list celebrities, we see the stars and not the characters.
The characters are fictional but their hopes and dreams are real enough, and every role is well-acted, even by lightweights like Lohan and Kutcher.
In the film's most prophetic bit of unintentional hilarity, Estevez literally walks off his own movie and passes the torch directly to Sirhan Sirhan for mop-up duty.
A powerful, poignant movie and its ending -- played over a long excerpt of one of RFK's most compassionate speeches, voiced with none of the cliches of political rhetoric -- was, for me, the movie year's single most devastating sequence.
All the actors get their Big Moments, but verisimilitude goes out the window.
Estevez has crafted an indelible portrait of a great man who, to many of us, is never thought of as anything but the brother of another dead Kennedy.
There are important movies and engrossing movies, but it's not often that both terms apply to the same movie. Bobby, which opens Thursday, is a fictionalized account of the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and it's one of the exceptions.
[S]ublime... so simple and so luminously powerful, so beautifully capturing the emotions of a moment in time...
Despite the clunkiness, Estevez's commitment to his father's generation's idealism (and its murder) commands respect.
Estevez has made a vague gesture at a large, metaphoric structure without having the dramatic means to achieve it.
Bobby does do a solid job of telling one generation what the world was like in the summer of 1968, and reminding another generation of a time when they believed a politician could change the world.
Estevez deftly weaves a stories of ordinary Americans into aglorious tapestry, activities and conversations occurring onthe day Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.
One of the year's best pictures, an unforgettable motion picture experience with an outstanding cast that shines brightly right down to the smallest part.
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