Bobby: From Gordon Bombay to Boredom All Day

The most kitchen-centric movie out right now is not "A Good Year", but "Bobby", Emilio Estevez' film about the Ambassador hotel on the night of Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Makes ya wanna see it, right? WRONG. Read on.

Kennedy was shot in the kitchen, and among its 19,000 main characters are a kitchen boy, a grandiloquent chef played by Lawrence Fishburne basically reprising his role as cosmic know-it-all Morpheus in a white toque and chef's jacket, and Christian Slater, taking a break from feeling up strangers to play the dickheaded kitchen manager.

Notes on "Bobby":

- Like a really long, really bad episode of the West Wing; shot similarly, with that signature Sorkin nerd-who-does-heroin talkiness, and those long, ambulatory shots.

- Emilio Estevez should be kept very far away from FinalDraft Pro. For safety's sake, we should probably keep him away from typewriters, alphabet blocks, notepads and crayons. The dialogue was painful throughout.

- Elijah Woods is Madonna's illegitimate baby, and here's why. His eyes are that same insane fake blue, lit up from within like a Furby. He's got the same gap in his front teeth. Most convincingly, he speaks weird Madonna British English. Lohan looks like she's laughing at him through the whole movie.

- With the exception of Sharon Stone, who looks like she's been hosed down with tropical parrot poop, nobody looks remotely 1960's. Everyone-- notably Heather Graham and Joy Briant--looks like they just walked off the set of TRL, perfect contemporary style intact. This would not be a problem if Estevez didn't attempt to cut in with real documentary footage from that night at the hotel, footage of people that look so preposterously, bowl-headedly, mutton-choppingly 1968 that you can't possibly stitch the film and documentary together visually.

- Ashton Kutcher provided the only real fun as a douchebag hippie who induces two young campaign interns to take acid. It was like an episode of Punk'd within the movie. That devilish Ashton and his merry mischief makery!

If you really want to know about Bobby Kennedy's shooting, watch the PBS doc "The Kennedys". By the end of it, with both his brothers gone, it's impossible to begrudge Ted Kennedy his 11 a.m. Mai Tai. Or his 11:15, 11:22, 11:37 and 11:39 Mai Tais. Estevez, however, has no excuse for taking himself so seriously.

Even with the moustache of an abject pervert, he tries to take himself seriously.