Bob Roberts
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Movie Reviews of Bob Roberts
Movie Review: PULLEASE
Summary: 2 Stars
"Bob Roberts" was Tim Robbins first foray into political filmmaking. He draws on his family experience as traveling folk singers and fashions a story of a conservative, religious political candidate who sings family songs on the campaign trail. The film itself is good stuff, well acted and produced, but the message is clear: White conservative Christians are just frauds and cannot be trusted. One watches it and wonders what a truthful depiction of Jesse Jackson would look like. Or an inside look at Joseph P. Kennedy pulling the strings in Jack's Congressional and Senate campaigns? Or the inside deals that kept Teddy Kennedy in office after Mary Jo Kopechne was killed? How about Al Sharpton and the Tawana Brawley incident? "Bob Roberts" is one of those movies that you just watch and shake your head.Movie Review: References to other documentaries
Summary: 4 Stars
To better appreciate this movie, it's good to know that it makes references (many, in fact) to the 1966 Bob Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back." If you haven't seen this earlier movie, naturally you won't pick up on these references (which are funny). What's interesting, though, is that at about the same time "Bob Roberts" was being made, the director of "Don't Look Back" was making a documentary (or perhaps had made ...), similar in nature to his earlier film, about Bill Clinton's campaign for the presidency called "The War Room." Cinema verite, no doubt.Movie Review: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Summary: 3 Stars
This movie should not be listed as a comedy, as it's far more a drama.The good: Definitely memorable for it's creepiness, and reality that something like this can and probably has happened.
The bad: it doesn't work as a documentary style film, as Best in Show or Waiting For Guffman later did.
The ugly: poor acting by many members of the supporting cast. The poor acting makes it even less believable as a documentary, because nobody in "real life" acts the way some of these characters do. At times it seems that the actors are amateurs practicing the scenes for the first time.
5/10
Movie Review: Make Money by any means Necessary
Summary: 4 Stars
By 1992, actor and leftist-liberal firebrand Tim Robbins had come a long way since his thankless role in the George Lucas uber-flop "Howard the Duck", and "Bob Roberts" displayed that the actor who had turned in fine performances in gritty movies like "The Player", "Jacob's Ladder", and---erm---"Erik the Viking" (he played Erik, and *I* liked it, anyway) had solid directorial chops, as well. "Bob Roberts" is a gimlet-eyed little mockumentary chronicling the rise, fall and rise of merciless, villainous, Machiavellian and media-savvy politician Bob Roberts, who---as the film's opening sequence makes clear---is a man of many talents: former West Pointer, Wall Street trader and stock market guru, self-made millionaire, and right-wing folk singer.
Folk singer?
That's the clever little hook on which Robbins hangs his skillful little fusillade against mindless political partisanship: Roberts has appropriated the Rebel Prophet image crafted at Woodstock for himself, and---horrors!---for right-wing Republican politics. Roberts is an ingenious political animal, having picked up a guitar and made the transition from Woodstock to Wall Street---and now he wants Main Street.
The plot is simplicity itself: "Bob Roberts" is played with a straight face as the'documentary' of the 1992 Bob Roberts Pennsylvania senatorial campaign, produced and 'directed' by fictional documentarian Terry Manchester (played convincingly by veteran British actor Brian Murray).
Robbins, along with cinematographer Jean LePine (who worked with Robbins on "The Player), has captured the documentary feel---and shows a flair for music videos as well; the Roberts remake of an old Bob Dylan video (entitled "Wall Street Rap") is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and continues Roberts's plunder of leftist icons: the last cue-cards Roberts tosses into the street read:
"Make...Money...by..any...Means...Necessary".
Robbins keeps up a taut and feverish MTV-like pace, charting Roberts's professional and political ride through interviews with parents, teachers, and friends, splicing them together with television appearances, interviews aboard the Roberts campaign bus (which doubles as a fully functional stock trading floor), and sequences from Roberts's folk concerts, where the candidate takes up his guitar and comes across as what might have happened had someone spliced Bob Dylan's genes with those of Rush Limbaugh.
That said, Robbins keeps the fun, intrigue, and political chicanery at a boil, and "Bob Roberts" is studded with famous faces all pulling off solid performances: Gore Vidal as the calcified liberal opponent, a young Jack Black as Bob's Number One Fan, Giancarlo Esposito as the tireless independent reporter digging for the truth, Alan Rickman as a scowling campaign supporter (and Black Ops mastermind) in dark glasses, Ray Wise as the gung-ho campaign manager, and Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, and James Spader as clueless (and absolutely hysterical!) network TV anchors round out the C-SPAN-fueled goodness. But that's a small complaint for the best 'mockumentary' since "This is Spinal Tap", and it's a nice antidote to the deadly serious, nasty real-life politics of our own combative age. Now if they'd just release the soundtrack...Movie Review: Hillarious
I couldn't believe how funny this movie was considering the fact that it was a film about politics with non other than the anti-american pair of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandan. For someone from the right this was an eye-opener into the psychodynamics of the confused liberal mind. This movie is incredibly funny in that at the same time it is a left wing critique of, and an unwitting self-expose into how misunderstanding Robbins and the like are of conservatism.
Summary: 5 Stars