Hirp On...

Over the past few days I’ve done a little catching up on my movie watching by renting a couple I missed in the theatre. Not really sure why I missed both of these, because I really wanted to see them when they came out. Anyway, here is a little review of Bobby and Alpha Dog.

I started my catching up by watching Bobby over the weekend. First thing to catch my eye when I heard about this movie wasn’t the cast, it was the director. I had just been wondering what happened to Emilio Estevez. Not that I was ever a big fan of his, but with his family having a nice run of success it was just one of those “whatever happened to,” moments. And I had seen a preview once for a movie, The War At Home, which he wrote and directed back in the mid-90s. I think it’s a preview on a movie I own, because I some how remember seeing the preview pretty frequently but I can’t really place it. The Sheen/Estevez family is pretty remarkable. Martin really reintroduced himself to the public with “The West Wing,” and Charlie reinvented himself from former punch line to television star with “Two and a Half Men.” Well the preview always looked pretty solid, but I never heard anything about the actual movie.

So about a year ago I was playing on IMDB.com as I often do, when I came across Bobby. Okay fine, I’ll admit it, I was looking up Lindsay Lohan again. That’s when I saw the cast, and there aren’t many casts that are as impressive and diverse as Bobby. You have your always fantastic, top notch performers in William H. Macy, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen and Anthony Hopkins. Then you have the tabloid favorites with Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher and to a lesser extent Sharon Stone and Christian Slater. There’s the Will Smith’s heir-apparent, who suddenly stopped taking his career seriously in Nick Cannon. The one time, impressive and cute child actor turned Hobbit, Elijah Wood. Along with Shia LaBeouf, who is the new “it” actor of the moment. An intriguing cast without question, although nothing like the cast of The Departed.

So that director and cast, along with the fact that I’m a bit of a Kennedy fan made this a movie of interest for a multitude of reasons. And I must say, it was a very good movie. There were surprisingly strong performances by Lohan, Stone and Slater. Mostly Lohan, place on my top 10 aside, she actually had the chops. You’d expect her to over act and play a living cliché, but she was actually charming, vulnerable and very low key. More about Sharon Stone later and Slater is all the way back. If only Hollywood had more faith in him, or if he had more faith in himself perhaps, we could see a Robert Downey Jr., like return.

As for the movie itself, it’s really more about the 60’s than it is Bobby Kennedy personally. The hope, last glimmer of hope for a generation, he provided is what we see, and that isn’t at all what you’d expect to see. When you hear there’s a movie about Bobby Kennedy, you’re expecting it to examine him not the impact of his life. Estevez easily could have made a juicy, Hollywood tale of another Kennedy and it probably would have been an interesting movie. But this was much more personal, and linking all these random lives together through one man shows us what a leader is supposed to do.

It’s not a flawless, can’t miss movie. It can be a bit slow, predictable and preachy at times. But it’s definitely worth picking up at Blockbuster or through Netflix, but probably won’t ever find a spot in my personal collection.

Okay, this doesn’t really fit into a review but, it just hit me that Emilio used to be engaged to Demi Moore. How friggin’ bizarre is that chick? She hangs out with her husband and ex-husband, and appears with her idiot husband in a movie directed by another ex.

Last night I watched the true-crime flick, Alpha Dog. This is another movie I had an interest in long before it made it to theatres, and then some how I missed it. I can’t remember if it was MSNBC or which channel that I first saw the story of Jesse James Hollywood and the kidnapping and murder that the movie is based on, but it was a fascinating story that sounded more like a movie than an actual event.

Turns out it made for a pretty good, but probably coulda been better movie. Everyone was solid, but it still felt more like a “look, Justin Timberlake can do this too” vehicle than gritty crime-drama. And Justin did a very respectable job making and idiot, misguided, troubled punk a like-able sympathetic figure. Ironically, this is probably where the movie went wrong. His character wasn’t the “Alpha Dog,” and shouldn’t have had such a prominent role. That should have been Emile Hirsch, who reminds me a bit of Shia LaBeouf. He played the ringleader to these idiots, who could easily be the same group of dumbasses that I knew in high school. The wannabe thugs, that got in over their heads and made the jump from wannabe’s to full fledged knuckleheads and criminals. So in other words, the guys that carjacked me. Only some how the real Jesse James Hollywood has eluded capture for years and made the FBI’s most wanted list, where as the guys I knew were all arrested within a couple of days.

Other notable performances were Ben Foster, a poor-man’s Ryan Gosling, and Sharon Stone who is on a little roll right now. For her to turn into a character actress now, and ditch the seductress role is a pretty ballsy move on her part. And this is her best work since Casino.

Something that stood out for me was the score, including songs by Tupac, Eminem, David Bowie, Citizen Cope and multiple songs by Kansas City’s own Tech N9ne (not that I’m a fan of his, but worth noting)