ONCE UPON A TIME there was a young man named Timothy and he wanted to make a movie. But not just any movie! He wanted to make an important movie that would be loved and respected. So he came up with an idea for a story and he put everything he could think of into it. The whole wide world was in his story, and it took a huge cast of characters to bring it off. "This is my Altman film," said Timothy.

But Timothy had never made a movie before, and he did not have the skill to keep all of those characters separate and to direct that many actors. So before anyone ever read his screenplay, Timothy cut it down, slashed out many plotlines, and eventually he only had a few characters and one story. They were not good characters, and it wasn't a good story, but it was manageable.

Then Timothy made another mistake, and he collected together all of his best friends to make his movie with him. He did not learn until it was much too late that it's a very dangerous thing to make a movie with friends, because the director will think of everybody as just the guys and not as professionals, and there is no discipline, and this is bad for the director, bad for the actors and bad for the movie. When Timothy finished his movie, it was not very good, because it did not have good characters or a good story, and the actors were undisciplined and the crew was unprofessional and the directing was frightened, but he knew all of this and he knew how to fix it in the future. So even though he made a bad movie, Timothy learned a lot. The End.

. . . . .

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a not-so-young man named Emilio, and he wanted to make a movie. But not just any movie! He wanted to make a movie that would change the world, that would remind people of the best things about America. So he came up with an idea for a story and he put everything he could think of into it. The whole wide world was in his story, and it took a huge cast of characters to bring it off. "This is an Altman film," said people who heard about the story.

But Emilio had never made a movie before (except that he had; oops, and wow that he could still be that incompetent), and he did not have the skill to keep all of those characters separate and to direct that many actors. However, Emilio was a child of privilege in Hollywood, and he didn't think he needed to change anything, especially because his brother Charlie told him that he was a good writer. So Emilio kept all of those characters and all of their plotlines, and none of them made any sense. And because there were so many plotlines and because Emilio had a lot of writer's block when he made up his story, most of the dialogue and exposition in his movie was leaden and clunky and horrible.

Then Emilio made another mistake, and he collected together all of his best friends to make his movie with him. Because a lot of Emilio's friends were wonderful actors, like Anthony and William and Laurence and Emilio's daddy Martin, Emilio didn't bother telling them what to do. So all of his friends just acted on their own without any direction, and while Anthony and William and Laurence and Martin were good at this, some of Emilio's friends like Demi and Lindsay and Shia and Ashton were very, very bad at it.

But Emilio didn't care, because the movie wasn't really about any of them or any of their characters. His movie was about how the only reason anything is ever bad in America is because Robert Kennedy was assassinated instead of elected in 1968, and nobody could ever possibly disagree with this because it is a fact that Robert Kennedy was the best man who ever lived in the world. And because the entertainment media enables people who make middlebrow art pieces that have good intentions but not any skill at execution whatsoever, some people thought Emilio's movie might win the magic golden statue for being a very good film in the eyes of a body of old white people with no taste in movies. But then the critics saw it, and although some of them liked it, some of them didn't like it, and they told Emilio what they didn't like. Perhaps, even though he made a bad movie, Emilio learned something, although it's anybody's guess what that might have been. The End.

. . . . .

It's not that I want to call myself a better filmmaker than Emilio Estevez, but I kind of am. At least, given access to the money and actors that he had access to, I can't imagine that I'd end up with such a leaden chunk of suck as Bobby. It's a film made with the least possibly niceness, from a wildly literal script that doesn't seem to have experienced a second draft.

The film wears its theme in bright big colors: the poster, the trailer, the tagline, the opening sequence, the closing sequence all scream "OMG BOBBY KENNEDY WE LOOOOOOVE YOU!" without ever pushing beyond the most senseless, idolatrous fanboy gushing. Now, I love RFK as much as the next person-who-was-born-after-1968, and it would take a uniqe sort of contrarian to argue that he wouldn't have been incalculably better for this country than Richard Nixon. But to maintain in good faith, as Estevez & Co. do here, that he would have single-handedly ended racism, poverty and war while also closing the generation gap leaves even the generous realm of hagiography behind.

Fortunately, the film is not in the large concerned with Bobby himself. Unfortunately, what it is concerned with is an endless series of poorly-acted, indifferently shot, obviously edited vignettes about the comings and goings of 22 caricatures in the Ambassador Hotel the day before Bobby is shot in its kitchen. It's pretty damn de rigeur to compare this to Nashville, but that's beyond insulting. One of the Irwin Allen disasters of the 1970s is a much better comparison: a huge cast of deeply overtalented actors fucks around until the Big Terrible Event happens, which is here an assassination instead of a swarm of killer bees.

I am all for good intentions, but they do not always translate into a film that is interesting in any remote degree, and they haven't done so here. And Estevez's good intentions are idiotic in any case. So all that's left is two hours of great actors without a trace of direction intoning the most clichéd sixties stereotypes imaginable, as written by a man who clearly has his entire view of that decade informed by sitcoms about wacky stoners and Teh Squares. There is not one element of this film that makes me want to recommend that anyone spend one moment of their life watching this. It is an incompetent thing made by a huge group of famous people. Watching them embarass themselves is not remotely fun enough to justify the experience of witnessing an actor-cum-director try to fellate himself for two hours.

. . . . .


ONCE UPON A TIME Timothy watched Emilio's movie, and after stumbling out into the light, this is the first thing he said to the first person he talked to: "That was ball-shatteringly awful."

2/10