|
COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
It's nice that liberals win elections now and then, but I'm not sure they should be allowed to make movies. Two new pictures, "Bobby" and "Fast Food Nation," inspired by the most humane sympathies, and outfitted with impeccably progressive attitudes--no one could disagree with a single notion in either film--are pretty much a trial to sit through. Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" is an imagining of everything that might have happened in the old Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 4, 1968, the day that Senator Robert F. Kennedy won the California primary, and during the early hours of June 5th, when he was assassinated in the hotel's kitchen. Estevez has attempted a kind of political version of "Grand Hotel," the Greta Garbo–John Barrymore kitsch classic from 1932, in which many glamorous people swirl into the lobby of a de-luxe Berlin establishment and trip across one another's destinies. In "Bobby," the Senator is seen in newsreels and, occasionally, from the rear, as a figure moving through the hotel. Yet the film is devoted not to him but to such things as the marital difficulties of the hotel's hair stylist and its manager (Sharon Stone and William H. Macy), the soft meanderings in the lobby of two retired gents (Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte), the psychedelic misadventures of a pair of truant campaign workers (Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf) who get turned...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
