Fifteen of us gathered last night for a screening of the 1992 Tim Robbins political satire Bob Roberts. This mockumentary of a folksinging conservative Wall Street trader turned politician has held up surprisingly well. In the background of the movie, President Bush is in the White House and American troops are about to invade Iraq. Gore Vidal does a great job playing a Ted Kennedy-style career senator. The songs are fun but sadly the soundtrack has never been made available.
My favorite part of the movie is when Bob Roberts closes a letter to a 7-year-old girl in Vermont with the admonition “Don’t do crack; it’s a ghetto drug.”
This is the perfect movie for an election-year party.
I read somewhere that Tim Robbins didn’t want to publish the soundtrack for fear that conservatives would use his songs out of context “for real”, i.e. for real-life advocacy purposes.
“This is the perfect movie for an election-year party.”
Absolutely – maybe as a double bill with the Robert Redford classic, “The Candidate.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103850/
There’s also a music credit for “Bob Roberts” in the Tim Robbins / John Cusack movie “Tapeheads.”