Eronat Reviews

Frankie and Johnny Are Married (2003)

A wonderful film about staying real, human, and loving in the face of life's unexpected challenges

[10/10 · 28 May 2004]

This is a wonderful film about staying real, human, and loving in the face of life's unexpected challenges. It's also an amusing, tender, non-sappy, very human- scale, look at the emotional turmoil of rehearsing and staging a live theater production on a small budget. Lisa Chess and Michael Pressman bring warmth and genuine heart to this fictionalized true story, playing themselves as actress and director of a stage production of Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune that turns into an unmitigated disaster. Alan Rosenberg is brilliant as the renegade actor who subverts the entire production.

One sub-plot -- what is it like for a man to direct his attractive wife doing nude sex scenes with an actor who has the real-life hots for her and doesn't believe in following the rules -- is particularly intriguing. The film opens in very limited distribution in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco in June. Catch it while you can.

Rebels with a Cause (2000)

Excellent History of Students for a Democratic Society

[9/10 · 3 November 2000]

Helen Garvy has put together a moving, revealing history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest of the protest organizations of the mid 1960's, as told by many of the people who were active in SDS at that time. The film offers an insightful look at the motivations, perspectives, and politics of those times. One of its significant messages is that, contrary to media revisions of the past twenty years or so, the protest movements of the 1960's and 1970's were in fact quite effective in bringing about significant social change in the U.S. A straightforward, inspiring look at the empowerment that comes from actually doing something to change the

Lolita (1997)

A generally accurate, provocative adaptation of the novel.

[9/10 · 15 September 1998]

In contrast to Stanley Kubrick's farce, Adrian Lyne has put together a sensitive, compelling adaptation of Nabokov's novel. While some elements of Humbert's relationship with Lolita are different from the book, this film gives a rich, complex perspective on Humbert, his love/hate relationship with Lolita, and all the dynamics that develop as their relationship runs its course. Given that the issue of the sexuality of children is one of the social hot buttons of the moment, it's good to see a film that addresses these issues without oversimplifying them or resorting to knee-jerk moralistic interpretation.