A Zip Request: Bobby Doesn't Delight or Disappoint

Rich and I went to the movies the other night. He wanted to see the Bond movie, and I wanted to see Borat. We ended up seeing Bobby, due to the timing of us getting to the theater after dinner.

My nana LOVED all things Kennedy family and my mom loved JFK as well. When my nana and then my mom died, I took a few big picture books on the Kennedy clan as well as many actual newspapers from when Kennedy was shot... that were yellowed and sitting in the basement.

Anyway, I didn't know anything about this Bobby movie, except that Emilio Estevez wrote and directed it and that Demi Moore was in it as well. I can't say that I was thrilled with the movie. The movie was set up much like Love Actually... a day in the life of, with many different story lines going on at once. It was very disjointed and although all these story lines come together at the end during one scene, I still wasn't satisfied. Sometimes I didn't understand why the story line was in there. The movie did a good job at trying to depict 1968: racism, the civil rights movement, the regaining of hope after JFK and MLK JR. were both killed, an unpopular Vietnam War, blah blah blah, through these different story lines... and characters. There was no Bobby Kennedy in the film. There were occassional speeches played and video clips shown, but that was it. I wanted something with a more solid story line... I wanted Bobby and Ethel and Kennedy history and family secrets (part Kennedy family admirer/part People Magazine reader.) There was an all star cast that included Lindsay Lohan, Anthony Hopkins, Martin Sheen, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Christian Slater, Elijah Wood, Heather Graham, Samuel L. Jackson, Helen Hunt, etc.. sometimes the all star cast made the movie and at other times, it was a bit distracting. (I must have commented on how old Helen Hunt looked at least 5 times.) Seeing Demi Moore as a drunk out of control movie star was just plain annoying and not very convincing.

All negativity aside, I do like movies that depict what it was like to live in another decade. I always wonder how politically charged I would have been if I lived in that time. Would I have actually attended Civil Rights marches? That part of the movie was the reason that Rich liked the movie more than I did, but the part that made me say it didn't disappoint. It succeeded in bringing you back to the country towards the end of the 1960s.. It just wasn't what I thought it would be.