CinemaSerf

Well I don't know quite was I was expecting, but this half-baked version of "Grand Hotel" - the television series rather than the classy 1932 film - certainly wasn't it. Indeed it has precious little to do with the titular politician, but more those people either attached to the early stages of his primary nomination campaign or to the legendary Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles. The constant is it's general manager John Casey (Sir Anthony Hopkins) who has met and greeted many of the great and the good over the years and who is passing his day with his friend "Nelson" (Harry Belafonte) awaiting the arrival of Senator Kennedy. Then there's "Ebbers" (William H.Macy) who's just had a run in with his catering manager "Simmons" (Christian Slater); a persistent Czech journalist trying to convince everyone she's not from a communist dictatorship; a couple of gents who just want to go join Ashton Kutcher and get stoned and some (il/legal) kitchen staff paranoid - with good reason - about being fired. There are also a couple of soapy sub-plots asking who's having an affair with whom and the whole thing is interspersed with some actuality of the night's real-time political events as if to give it some weight. Sadly, though, despite it's pretty stellar cast the whole thing just doesn't knit in anything like an interesting enough fashion. It's as if Emilio Estevez determined to get as many of his friends and family (and their friends and family) to take part in a Democrat fundraising movie peppered with some rousing dogma from the archives. It's over-scripted, pace-less and there are way too many distractions to make this anything compelling to watch. Shia LaBeouf at least looked like he enjoyed his part as the acid tripping "Cooper" but otherwise this borders on the earnest and frankly, the dull. Perhaps if it'd been called "Bobby's Hotel" then I might not have been so disappointed, but it wasn't and I was. Sorry.