I saw a really intriguing film last night called Frankie and Johnny Are Married, about a Hollywood couple who decide to put on a play in Los Angeles so that they could work together for the first time, and reinvigorate their marriage. I saw it mostly because I got a free pass, but I had heard good things about it. It's pretty much a vanity film about a vanity project by a Hollywood producer, Michael Pressman, and his wife, actress Lisa Chess, where they are the subjects of the film, shot documentary-style, and play themselves(!). On one level, it's absolutely outrageous, but the performances are quite incredible. Pressman is so good on camera that it's mind boggling figuring out what he's doing (he's a producer acting in a film that he wrote about him as a director of a play that he acts in) and realizing that he isn't an actor. His wife is a struggling actress, playing herself in real life, playing a role in a play that her husband produces and directs so that she can get exposure as an actress.

I want to ask if these performances are so good because they're just playing themselves and it's easy because all they gotta do is act naturally, but then I imagine that "performing yourself" must be one of the hardest things to do when you're on a set, with a crew, and lights and cameras, because that's the most unnatural setting possible. The performances and the relationship study are what carry the film, and once the third lead, actor Alan Rosenberg, playing (spoofing?) himself, leaves, the film loses much of its wind, and the film glides to its end almost on momentum alone, and the injections of crisis and drama feel contrived. It's definitely worth seeing, but not necessarily in the theaters. I would say that actors and people working in the theater, and people interested in the production side of entertainment, definitely should see it. But this is no Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Living in Oblivion.