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Good movie but grossly overrated

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Writer-director Ivy Meerepol has been accused of being 'amateurish' or 'naive' in the making of this exceptional film. For me, this lack of 'slickness' is why this doc packs such an emotionally wallop. The starkness and edginess, along with Meerepol's own tentative uncertainties, were entirely commensurate with the shadowy period she was investigating.I was much impressed by Meerepol, who took on a huge challenge: how to find the truth, warts and all, about her larger-than-life grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. She is an intelligent and sensitive person on a journey of determined discovery about an era blanketed by dark suspicion and paranoia. I was 15 years old when the Rosenbergs were executed. It was a time of madness in America (a fairly constant thing to this day in my opinion). The norm was mass hysteria, fueled by the American government, about the Red Menace. It was the age of grisly neo-fascists like the alcohol-ridden lunatic Joe McCarthy, the deeply closeted gay-basher Roy Cohn, noted drag queen J. Edgar Hoover, and, yes, Tricky Dicky Nixon. All of them (and many others) casually destroyed countless lives with righteous indignation. They were the last people who should be indignant, righteously or otherwise. Joe Stalin, a great American ally only a few years before (echoes of Saddam and bin Laden 40 years later), was still alive and served as the ideal American villain. He was part of the Axis of Evil long before George Bush pretended he invented the term. These were the hostile social and political conditions surrounding the sacrificial killing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It was only a few years after George Orwell wrote '1984,' but the mind control featured in that book was already embedded in the psyche of the 'Free World'.I was much impressed by Ivy's persistence, and by the brilliant commentary and encouragement of her father Michael (the Rosenbergs' eldest son). When Ivy arranges for Michael and his brother Robert to visit their parents' old apartment, it was a creepy (and powerful) moment in the film. The two brothers seemed overwhelmed by the eerie 'sameness' of the apartment. They were also spooked by the very same elevator that, 50 years earlier, contained a small army of FBI agents who stormed into the apartment and arrested their father. From the moment he left the apartment and stepped into that elevator with the FBI agents, Julius Rosenberg was doomed. This documentary is outstanding, and Ivy Meerepol deserves tremendous credit.

I'm not sure what makes this embarrassingly amateur 'symp-documentary' more painful to watch, the fact that it's mostly misplaced, vindictive pseudo-journalism or that there are many gullible America-hating minds ready to eat this trash up.The Venona Papers (opened after the fall of the Soviet Union) have confirmed without a doubt that the Rosenbergs were not only traitors giving the Russians America's atomic secrets, they also showed that the Rosenbergs were hard-core ideologues who felt their mission was more important than theirs or other people's lives. FACT - While the USSR was killing millions of its own citizens, these two criminals were doing everything in their power to help spread communism over the earth. David Greenglass was a scum and he's probably the closest thing there is to Julius and Ethel......except he talked.I'm sure it would be hard for any descendant of this sinister couple to come to terms with what they did, much less move on and live for themselves; in fact, Ivy Meeropol has actually put her mind in REVERSE and regresses to a point of blaming everyone but the traitors. I can't imagine anyone sitting and listening to her and her family and not wanting to get the hell away.The title of this film should be 'How To Waste Your Life And Wallow In Pity And Hate Because Your Grandparents Were Willing Tools For Totalitarinasm'

The Rosenbergs are poster children for the black and white horror of what became known as the McCarthy Era, the Communist Witch Hunts, of the early '50s. Their faces, especially Ethel's, is as recognizable to us as McCarthy's himself. Ivy Meeropol, their granddaughter, grew up with an activist father who believed that his parents were, as they said repeatedly and even at their deaths in the electric chair, innocent. Her home was filled with their images, from newspaper accounts, books, and newsreel footage stills, to pieces of art created by the likes of Picasso. But this film only makes passing reference, I feel, to the fact of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. What it does do is present us with a granddaughter's rather guileless investigation of who her family are. Her own name was changed by her father's adoption by another family since his own grandparents, aunts, and uncles--on both sides--Greenglass and Rosenberg-- would not take the two orphaned boys in. Her cousins (one of whom she meets for the first time and who weeps with shame at how his own father--Julius's brother--changed their name to Roberts and refused to even see his two nephews) are complete strangers to her. What does she find out? Does she know her grandparents better? I doubt it. She can't know why the Rosenbergs chose to die rather than betray political beliefs, friends, and their nearly religious conviction that Socialism was humankind's only hope. What she can see is what shame, fear, cowardice, infamy, and love does to a family. I think Lillian Hellman's title for her memoir of the same period names it best: Scoundrel Time. After all, the Rosenbergs' convictions and executions made Roy Cohn into a celebrity. God help us.

The entire film is based on a fallacy and therefore makes it difficult to watch. Ivy basis the documentary on the misleading notion that her grandparents are not guilty of being traitors. The facts are that her grandparents were spies. Later, her father Michael says, Julius might have helped the Soviets, but Julius did not do what the government accused him of. Then another person says Ethel was only being a loyal wife.The film is a sophomoric effort to understand the dark stain on her family. The camera work, editing, and narration are all weak. Ivy should have created a documentary on what caused the executions. It wasn't 'red scare', or 'communist witch-hunts'. It was because Julius and Ethel were spies for the Soviets. They are both guilty of betraying their country.