Product Description

Tim Robbins stars as BOB ROBERTS, a radical folksinger turned senatorial candidate, in this satirical comedy that blends his campaign trail with singing, music videos and scandal. BOB ROBERTS is a hilarious film that will change the way you look at American politics!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15011 in DVD
• Brand: Lions Gate
• Released on: 2001-08-14
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 102 minutes

Amazon.com
Written and directed by actor Tim Robbins (who also plays the title role), this 1992 mock documentary about an upstart candidate for the U.S. Senate is smart, funny, and scarily prescient in its foreshadowing of the Republican revolution of 1994. Bob Roberts is a folksinger with a difference: He offers tunes that protest welfare chiselers, liberal whining, and the like. As the filmmakers follow his campaign, Robbins gives needle-sharp insight into the way candidates manipulate the media. While the film follows Roberts's campaign, it also covers a fringe journalist (Giancarlo Esposito), who may have dug up the kind of dirt to push Roberts's campaign off the rails. Robbins captures the chilly insincerity of this right-wing populist and fills his cast with terrific supporting players, including Alan Rickman as the campaign's shadowy financier and Susan Sarandon and Peter Gallagher as a pair of airhead TV news anchors. --Marshall Fine

From The New Yorker
Tom Robbins is the writer, director, and star of this mock documentary that chronicles, C-SPAN style, the senatorial campaign of a young radical-right demagogue. Bob Roberts is a folksinger: instead of giving speeches, he picks up an acoustic guitar and invites his audiences to sing along with his reactionary "protest" anthems. He's Pat Buchanan in Woody Guthrie's clothing, and what's scary about the movie is that this grotesque coupling doesn't even feel like a stretch. Robbins works like an inspired political cartoonist: this picture is his chance to have his say on everything that's been bugging him for the past twelve years, and he makes the most of it. He tosses off nasty satiric riffs at a reckless, headlong pace, and the movie, even at its most chilling, is hilarious; its humor is both precise enough to deflate its targets and goofy enough to feel liberating. And his performance as smiling Bob, although it's conceived as a caricature, is never tiresome: it's too finely detailed, and too gleeful. The picture is a down-and-dirty exercise in negative campaigning, and it's bracing to see some mean, memorable zingers coming from the left. Wittily, Robbins has appropriated for his own purposes the attack-dog campaign style of the right wing. This terrifically entertaining movie represents something very unlikely and very welcome: liberal humor with sharp teeth. Also with Gore Vidal, Alan Rickman, Giancarlo Esposito, Brian Murray, and Ray Wise. Many familiar performers turn up in juicy cameos: John Cusack, Bob Balaban, Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, Pamela Reed, Peter Gallagher, James Spader, Helen Hunt, and the country singer Kelly Willis. Tim Robbins wrote the lyrics of Bob Roberts' songs; David Robbins (his brother) wrote the music. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Occasionally heavy-handed, but still both funny and chilling
"Bob Roberts," Tim Robbins' 1992 fictional account of the political campaign of a folk-singing conservative businessman, is a remarkable film. Echoing D.A. Pennebaker's 1966 documentary "Don't Look Back" (which covered Bob Dylan's 1965 U.K. tour; a number of scenes in "Bob Roberts" are cribbed directly from the Pennebaker film), "Bob Roberts" follows the title character (played by Robbins, who also directs and writes here) in his 1990 Senatorial campaign against Brickley Paiste, a once-vigorous, but now-weary and increasingly disenchanted New Frontier-era liberal democrat (played by author Gore Vidal). Roberts, who had made a fortune on Wall Street during the '80s, first gains national attention in the late '80s with a pair of critically panned, but commercially successful albums (clever homages to two early '60s Dylan albums) of right-wing country-folk songs. Using his musical fame as a springboard, Roberts embarks on his political career, backed by press aide Chet MacGregor (Ray Wise) and the shadowy Lukas Hart III (Alan Rickman, whose Mephistophelean presence almost steals the movie). Along the way, Roberts is tailed by journalist Bugs Raplin (Giancarlo Esposito), who is eventually framed for an assassination attempt on Roberts when he gets too close to uncovering Hart's and Roberts' shady involvement in both the Iran-Contra and S&L debacles of the '80s. Largely viewed at the time of its release as a broad slap at the New Right, in retrospect Robbins is nearly as critical of the Old Left. Vidal's Brickley Paiste is old, tired, and nearly irrelevant (and, sadly, seems to know it). If Robbins is scathing in his indictment of the Right, Paiste symbolizes Robbins' criticism of the Left for their lack of energy and ideas. Given the kind of pasting Democrats received in the '94 election, more of them would have done well to pay attention to Robbins' uncannily prescient warning. Cameos abound. Watch for the likes of Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, and others as reporters, as well as country singer Kelly Willis as Joan Baez to Robbins' Dylan. One final note: In a perfect example of life imitating art once again, "Bob Roberts" neatly foreshadowed R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor's "A Perfect Candidate," a 1996 documentary of Oliver North's 1994 Virginia Senate campaign. Ironically, Cutler had been invited by North's handlers to film the campaign because they had liked his earlier documentary, "The War Room," on which Cutler had worked with - you guessed it - D.A. Pennebaker. Watch all three in chronological order someday if you have the time.

truer today than when it first came out
I saw this film when it first came out in '92, and thought it was okay, but rewatching it during the 2004 election season I was appalled by how many of the absurdities depicted had come true, with cynical pandering and manipulation at every turn. The only thing it's missing are voting machines that count backward! The title character, played by Tim Robbins (who also wrote and directed), is a right-wing folk singer pursuing a senate seat, running against an incumbent played by Gore Vidal. The songs and album covers are very funny, and there are many cameo appearances.

DVD extras include three commentary tracks, 22 minutes of deleted scenes, stills, 3 music videos, cast notes, production notes, a trailer and tv spots.

Worthwhile viewing, good extras.

Make Money by any means Necessary
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. "Bob Roberts" occasionally stumbles: the sequence on the comedy-show "Cutting Edge" is just painful, and comes across as sour and false.

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...