Last issue, I rambled on about mostly good developments in cinema during the last year. 2006 did, however, offer up its expected share of stinkers, some smellier than others. The scent of rip cheese and dirty feet was most prominent on one specific title, though.

Bobby. Yep, the Emilio Estevez drama about the day that led up to Robert Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles in 1968. Wait, isn't this the one with all the stars? The one that is named on some (dubious) year end Best Of lists? Isn't it a movie with serious ambition?

Yeah, that's all true, but the stench of garbage is still all over this one. Estevez should be congratulated for writing and directing so ambitious a film - but that doesn't make it good. The same kind of sympathetic good will pushed an extra star (or two) onto reviews of Leonardo Di Caprio's bloated Blood Diamond. Look, the assassination was a tragic event, which felled a politician on whom so many pinned their hopes. We will never know if Kennedy could have lived up to all those dreams, but I do know that Estevez's dreams to make an important statement on an era and our country is nothing more that a TV movie from the 1970s, dressed up with movie stars performing histrionic monologues. The only thing that stops Bobby from being The Love Boat is the presence of some real movie stars mixed in with the riff-raff.
Daddy Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt are a married couple who bicker a little. That's their story. Ex-girlfriend (calling in favors, Emilio?) Demi Moore is an alcoholic singer married to long suffering Estevez, while Demi's current hubby, Ashton Kutcher is laughable as a drug dealer holed up in the hotel. Beneath a Halloween wig, he trips on acid a la anti drug films from the 1960s. See him talk to an orange, while Shia La Boef tosses a TV from the window.

More effective is Freddy Rodriguez from Six Feet Under, saddled with a sort of stupid story (well, at least his character is given a story) about wanting to go to a ball game with his son, rather than working a double shift. Also okay, is Sharon Stone, as the unlikely wife of hotel manager William H. Macy. He, in turn, is bedding telephone operator Heather Graham. Yeah, right. Her brief pop-up appearances give one the idea that many scenes were just shot because someone had a few free hours available.
And then there's Lindsay Lohan, increasingly unbelievable as a nice girl, Elijah Wood as her nervous groom, David Krumholz with retarded hair, and on and on. Isaac, I think it's time for drinks on the Lido Deck.

By the end, when the shooting has left several characters shot, you realize that all of these stories and characters has added up to nothing more than I-told-you-so kind of punch line.

The ridiculous scenes are far preferable and more entertaining than those which simply bore. Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte are deadly dull talking about - what were they talking about? Some didactic lectures on everything from race relations to throwaway jokes about hanging chads smack of the worst kind of looking back on history and smugly lecturing on it from a 21st century perspective.

Yeah, the costumes and hairstyles are fun to look at, but so is an old magazine from the 1960s.