LA Weekly

BOBBY 1968, the Ambassador Hotel, filled with guests and service workers whose lives bear no connection except that they breathe the same air and inhabit the same spaces as Robert F. Kennedy in the 24 hours preceding his assassination. Written and directed by Emilio Estevez, Bobby is like an American-history textbook marked with thick yellow highlighter wherever a parallel might be detected between the Vietnam era and the reign of Bush II. Among the revelations: that, in ’68, America was embroiled in an unpopular, unwinnable foreign conflict; that the nation’s electoral process was rife with accusations of voter intimidation and fraud; and that, with a single burst of gunfire, the last hopes of an idealist counterculture were stamped out for good. Who knew? In the months it has been playing the festival circuit, Bobby has duped some ordinarily discerning critics into lauding it as a kind of proletarian Grand Hotel, which says more about how void mainstream movies are of visions of working-class life than about Estevez’s insights into race and class in America, which rarely rise above the ebony-and-ivory-living-in-harmony level. (Especially nauseating is the bit where Freddy Rodriguez’s put-upon Latino kitchen worker gives his prized Dodgers tickets to Laurence Fishburne’s black, T.H. White–quoting chef.) Mostly the movie operates as a high-toned multicharacter soap opera, in which various people in crisis — a draft dodger (Elijah Wood) about to enter into a sham marriage with a high school classmate (Lindsay Lohan); a switchboard operator (Heather Graham) trying to end her affair with the hotel manager (William H. Macy); two campaign volunteers (Shia LeBeouf and Brian Gerghty) wondering if their daylong LSD trip may have cost their boss the primary — resolve their differences in long-winded monologues that have the ring of greeting-card platitudes. All the while, Estevez pours on excerpts of Kennedy’s rousing campaign speeches so shamelessly that it’s easy to see how some viewers could get caught up in it — the movie is designed to be a nostalgia trip for the old and a “Gee, things weren’t so different back then” eye opener for the young. The only character who emerges as more than an ideological mouthpiece, and nearly saves the movie, is the Ambassador’s resident hairstylist, who masks her faded beauty with a thick coat of eye shadow and an overteased hairdo. I kept wondering who this deeply sad, earthy actress was, making so much out of so little, until I realized it was Sharon Stone in the most naked performance she’s ever given without taking her clothes off. The rest of the movie is emotional pornography of the sort that tends to go down well with Academy voters — no surprise that at the “for your consideration” screening I attended, there was hearty applause, and not a dry eye in the house. (ArcLight) (Scott Foundas)


CASINO ROYALE See film feature


THE CAVE OF THE YELLOW DOG Byambasuren Davaa’s follow-up to 2004’s exquisite Story of the Weeping Camel (which she co-directed) doesn’t quite rise to the high-water mark of its predecessor (which similarly blended elements of fiction and documentary filmmaking), but is quite charming in its own right. Like the earlier film, Cave follows the day-to-day life of a nomadic Mongolian family as they tend their animals, do chores around their home, raise their three young children and navigate the encroachment of modernity. When the oldest daughter brings home a puppy she’s found, it puts her at odds with her father, who wants her to get rid of it. What pulls the viewer in (aside from the charismatic real-life family playing the roles) is the film’s compassionate, empathetic perspective. Without being heavy-handed about it, Davaa captures both the hardship of the family’s life and the graceful pragmatism with which they live. She also finds some nail-biting moments in the interplay of humans and nature, as when the youngest child catches the eyes of circling vultures. The Cave of the Yellow Dog has an abundance of gentle humor, much of it provided by an adorably scruffy toddler, but there’s also impressive strength and wisdom in the family’s uncomplaining, shoulder-to-the-wheel approach to the world. Mercifully, the life lessons are more poetic than preachy. (NuWilshire; One Colorado) (Ernest Hardy)


FAST FOOD NATION See film feature


FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION See film feature


FORGIVING DR. MENGELE It’s hard to know whether to be impressed or appalled by Eva Mozes Kor, the Holocaust survivor in Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh’s fascinating documentary who has made forgiving the Nazis her life’s work. Kor has much to forgive: She and her late sister were “Mengele twins,” subjected to monstrous quasiscientific experiments by Auschwitz’s notorious Angel of Death. Returning to Auschwitz on the 50th anniversary of its liberation, this matronly Indiana realtor confers, to the horror and outrage of other surviving Mengele twins, her own private amnesty on all Nazis while corralling one former Nazi physician into an official apology. Forgiving Dr. Mengele raises the usual questions about whether forgiveness is possible or appropriate, but its more bracing (and perhaps unwitting) query harks back to Bruno Bettelheim and Primo Levi — namely, whether certain psychological dispositions lent themselves more readily to survival in the camps. Kor is a force of nature, not to mention a control freak, and her willingness to walk all over other survivors in her quest to forgive her tormentors makes you wonder to what degree the “total freedom” she claims to get from forgiving is an ongoing — and understandable — attempt to master her own enduring terrors. A partial answer comes from her rather unwilling meeting in Israel with a group of angry but moderate Palestinians: Confronted with a different perceived enemy, Kor clams up and withdraws into herself, her face a mask of fear. (Grande 4-Plex) (Ella Taylor)