the only marathon i can run

My father dumped several DVDs back home, and so –

Bobby

On June 5, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy passes through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with his wife, Ethel, and his security detail. He has just given a speech following a victory. He shakes hands with reporters, smiles for the cameras. A young man standing in the crowd raises his arms. The young man is holding a gun.

But this film is not about Bobby. It is not a documentary. We do not learn more about his life, the games he plays with his kids, his favorite breakfast. We do not see him brooding in a roomful of shadows.

This film is about June 5, 1968. It is just like any other day, but to some people the date is relatively more important. There’s a Dodgers game, for one thing. Kennedy’s campaign team is waiting for the results of the California primary. Inside the Ambassador Hotel, disgruntled busboys are working on a double shift, and the hotel’s inhabitants are dealing with their personal dramas. Some of the troubles shown in the film could have happened anytime – 1968, 1988, 2008; others have problems hopelessly connected to their current political landscape. At one point, a young student campaigner, after dropping acid with a friend, wonders aloud what will happen if Bobby Kennedy loses. “I’m only 19, I don’t want to go to Vietnam,” he tells his friend. “Do you?”

The film, written and directed by Charlie Sheen’s brother, Emilio Estevez, is like 22 short stories with the same setting, and the same ending. Peter Travers in the Rolling Stone called it “trite fiction”; I loved it.

Who’s in this film? Apparently everyone: Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan, Nick Cannon, Joshua Jackson, Shia LaBeouf, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, your next-door neighbor, Inday, everyone.

The Hoax

Remember that character Leo DiCaprio plays in The Aviator? So billionaire Howard Hughes was a bit, um…eccentric. Clifford Irving used this fact to his advantage.

Sometime in the 70’s Clifford Irving’s novel gets shelved by publishing bigwig McGraw-Hill. Irving so desperately wants to be published that he tells the firm’s executives that he has met with Hughes, who has asked him, personally, to write his autobiography with him.

Richard Gere, Alfred Molina. This film is love. This is a true story, too. After the autobiography was revealed as a hoax by Hughes himself, Irving wrote his own autobiography, detailing what he did to come up with one of the biggest cons in publishing history. The title of the book: The Hoax. The nerve of the guy.

The House Is Burning

I think this film was invited to the Cannes Film Fest. I don’t care. It’s boring, it’s generic. Just a bunch of sweating teenagers screaming at each other. Nice title, though. Sayang.