Ernst Lubitsch's The Loves of Pharaoh, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

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Another alert for the Siren's patient New York readers: On Oct. 18 through Oct. 20, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is presenting the great Ernst Lubitsch's 1922 silent, The Loves of Pharaoh. Lost for many years, then thought to exist only in fragments, the movie has been painstakingly stitched back into close to its original form, and will be the inaugural screening for the BAM Harvey Theater's Steinberg Screen.

This is what you call a major film-preservation event.

The Loves of Pharaoh, says BAM, is being shown as part of its Next Wave festival, and will be accompanied "by the world premiere of a new score by Brooklyn-based composer Joseph C. Phillips Jr....to be performed live by his acclaimed 18-piece new music ensemble, Numinous."

The Siren has been told that The Loves of Pharaoh is not typical Lubitsch; instead it's a splendid eyeful of an epic. Any chance to see a large-scale silent movie on a big screen, accompanied by live musicians and a full score, is to be seized at all costs. So the Siren is attending tonight's performance; Comrade Lou Lumenick of the New York Post plans to attend later this weekend. The Siren urges her patient readers to turn out for this event as well.

Morning-after update: Since cherished commenter Rozsaphile brought up the score, and in case anyone is on the fence, the Siren thought she'd add a few off-the-cuff thoughts. Indeed this is not what you think of as Lubitsch, although there is plenty of panting sexual desire. It's magnificent-looking, though, particularly on the big screen in the beautiful Harvey Theater, which has been updated with its crumbling atmosphere intact.

The restoration is superb. Missing footage is replaced, when possible, with stills, and this works much better for the silent Loves of Pharaoh--they're a bit like pictorial intertitles--than it does for, say, Cukor's A Star Is Born, where the sudden intrusion of stills throws the Siren out of the movie, every time. According to Dave Kehr, the German unemployment situation in 1922 basically meant they could have all the extras they wanted, and the crowd scenes will blow your mind. Lubitsch could, like Griffith and DeMille, show the teeming sweep of an army or a mob while still giving a sense of the individuals within. Certain scenes--such as one set in the inner chambers of Pharaoh's treasury--are heart-stoppingly beautiful. The tinting is exquisite.

The Siren loves how Kehr describes the way things worked out, in terms of film history: "After “Pharaoh,” DeMille folded his style into Lubitsch’s for his first version of “The Ten Commandments,” while Lubitsch, in one of film history’s tidier paradoxes, turned away from costume pictures to DeMille-style sex comedies on his arrival in Hollywood." Loves is no comedy. Plot elements include torture, violence, child murder, maimings, and a downbeat ending. There are maybe two or three laughs that the Siren would characterize as intentional jokes. Otherwise the laughter in the audience was mostly at instances of actorly excess, and some unfortunate (to modern eyes) choices like the wig on Ramphis (Harry Liedtke). Emil Jannings gives his side-eye technique quite a workout, and also gets to do the Great-Man-Brought-to-Depths-of-Degradation scenes that the guy must have had written into his contract somehow. (The Siren's not a huge Jannings fan.)

This is where the new score comes in. It's strikingly modern, not a type of music the Korngold-loving Siren would have necessarily chosen. She thought it worked extremely well, however. Composer Joseph C. Phillips clearly took Loves of Pharaoh seriously and gave it music that played the emotions of the scenes straight, not campy. The score kept the audience focused, kept nervous titters to a minimum and complemented the emotions. You can't ask much more than that.

So you don't want to miss this, if at all possible. For those who can't make it to BAM, Loves of Pharaoh is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Gentlemen, Mary Pickford Doesn't Need Your Advice

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In 1912, Mary Pickford, age 20, was working at Biograph Studios. D.W. Griffith was casting a short movie called The Sands of Dee.

Pickford wanted the lead and, since "abundant hair was a requisite," she thought she had a pretty good shot.




But, as she tells it in her 1955 autobiography Sunshine and Shadow, recently Griffith had also asked Pickford to wear a grass skirt in Man's Genesis. She'd refused to do any such hussy-ish thing as flashing her bare legs and feet to the paying public. Newcomer Mae Marsh, who immediately prior to Biograph had been working a counter at Bullock's Department Store, donned the grass get-up.

Perhaps Pickford's qualms strike you as quaintly Victorian. The Siren offers a reminder that in her heyday, Mary Pickford had a mind as shrewd as any ever to hit Hollywood:




You can see a clip of Man's Genesis here, although you may want to mute the sarcastic commentary. Musketeers of Pig Alley, it ain't. The upshot was that a wrathful Griffith gave Marsh The Sands of Dee as a rebuke to all who would refuse to sport grass skirts whenever Genius asked them to do so.

Pickford was peeved, as was Blanche Sweet's grandma, who fumed, "I don't see how she can possibly play the part. The girl hasn't any hair." But, for now, the joke was on them; Pickford admitted that Marsh was wonderful in Sands of Dee.

The future Queen of the Movies donned a hairshirt, so to speak: "If a little girl fresh from a department store could give a performance as good or better than any of us of who had spent years mastering our technique, then pictures were not for me."

She decided to go back to the theater. In this she was encouraged by the recollection of an encounter with the author of her breakout play, The Warrens of Virginia. She'd just started at Biograph, and William de Mille hadn't exactly been happy for her.



Unbeknownst to Pickford, de Mille also had written a letter to the legendary producer David Belasco, lamenting the young actress' career path to that point:

...Do you remember that little girl, Mary Pickford, who played Betty in The Warrens of Virginia? I met her again a few weeks ago and the poor kid is actually thinking of taking up moving pictures seriously. She says she can make a fairly good living at it, but it does seem a shame. After all she can't be more than sixteen or seventeen and I remember what faith you had in her future; that appealing personality of hers would go a long way in the theater, and now she's throwing her whole career in the ash-can and burying herself in a cheap form of amusement which hasn't a single point that I can see to recommend it. There will never be any real money in those galloping tintypes and certainly no one can expect them to develop into anything which could, by the wildest stretch of imagination, be called art.

I pleaded with her not to waste her professional life and the opportunity the stage gives her to be known to thousands of people, but she's rather a stubborn little thing for such a youngster.

So I suppose we'll have to say goodbye to little Mary Pickford. She'll never be heard from again, and I feel terribly sorry for her...

Pickford told her Biograph boss adios. Griffith responded in accents of doom: "Do you suppose for one minute that any self-respecting theatrical producer will take you now after spending three years in motion pictures?"

Mary Pickford retorted that next year, she'd be on Broadway in a Belasco production.




The theater season didn't start for a few months, so she remained at Biograph, where she was not under contract. One can deduce from Griffith's subsequent conduct that he was miffed. He'd just hired two promising sisters, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, whom Mary had known previously and introduced to him. In the perpetual way of bosses, Griffith played the newcomers against his recalcitrant star. He began one day of shooting with the gallant sally, "Pickford, why don't you get a nice costume like Gish's?" He ordered them upstairs to swap dresses. They knew what was going on, of course, and Lillian told Pickford that it was all right, she liked Mary's dress better anyway.

Once back on the set, though, Mary's blood was up: "It's too bad, Mr. Griffith, that you can't get a good performance without trying to come between two friends."

"That stung," wrote Pickford. Griffith called her a baby. Pickford yelled back, "Mr. Griffith, I don't like the way you direct and I never have. If you were a real director you wouldn't have to try to turn me against Lillian to get a good scene. Why don't you think of a more honest way of directing me?"

Griffith called her "a half-pint" and gave her a shove. Pickford tripped and wound up on the floor, calling him a "disgrace to the South" and "to the North as well." Griffith tried to help her up, she waved him off and stormed to her dressing room, where she began packing in a suitcase-banging manner calculated to be heard all over the set.

Griffith gathered his cast and crew and stood outside Pickford's door, leading them in a rendition of "So Long, Mary." She melted, they made up.

But she still left, immediately after making The New York Hat, the most successful thing she did for Griffith. You see, Mary had already lined up a new gig...with David Belasco.





One of Pickford's first actions after returning to Belasco, who had a hard-nosed reputation in his own right, was to negotiate a $25-a-week raise from her Biograph salary. That gave her $200 a week, a fortune in those days. (Years later Samuel Goldwyn remarked that "it took longer to make one of Mary's contracts than it did one of Mary's pictures.")

1913 found her starring on Broadway in Belasco's The Good Little Devil. It was a hit. Opening night in Philadelphia, Griffith was in the front row.




Little more than a decade later, in 1924, D.W. Griffith's increasingly mismanaged finances caused him to break ties with United Artists, the company he'd founded with Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks just five years before. United Artists spent the next decades establishing itself as the Pearl White of movie studios, seemingly always in some sort of peril; but Pickford sold her stock in 1956 for $3 million.



To return to 1913; Pickford had done precisely what she said she would. Problem was, she didn't like acting in plays. Or, rather, she discovered she loved film acting more: "the novelty, the adventure, from day to day, into unknown areas of pantomime and photography." Back she went to Hollywood, and signed with Famous Players-Lasky. The following year, the massive success of Tess of the Storm Country cemented Mary Pickford as the first superstar. As Scott Eyman put it, "Her public--indeed, the whole world--loved her as no actress will ever be loved again."

William C. de Mille kept his lower-case "d" but followed brother Cecil B. D. to Hollywood, where he directed more than 50 films (most of them, aside from Miss Lulu Bett, now lost).

In 1929, the man who in 1909 told David Belasco that no one could expect these "galloping tintypes" to develop into art co-hosted the inaugural awards ceremony for an outfit calling itself the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The other host was Douglas Fairbanks, Mary's second husband.



The following year, de Mille hosted solo, and presented the Best Actress Oscar to Mary Pickford, for Coquette.

The Marsh King's Daughter by Elizabeth Chadwick - Review

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The Synopsis - Unwanted and unloved, Miriel Weaver finds herself forced into a closed convent by her violent stepfather. Outside, the civil war of 1216 rages through the English countryside, throwing into jeopardy all that its people hold dear. As the turmoil outside reaches a peak, Miriel itches to break free from her life inside as a religious novice. She plots to escape but her plans screech to a halt when a soldier of fortune, a half-dead Nicholas de Caen appears at the convent door. Once held captive by royalist troops, he has managed to escape their clutches with part of the royal regalia, but his flight has sapped all life from him. Miriel nurses him with the vigor she has had suppressed in her imprisonment, and revives Nicholas, in whom she recognizes her own stubborn pride and independence. He is not only her kindred spirit, he is also her only way out. So upon his recovery and release, Miriel coerces her former patient into taking her with him. 
Never one for nostalgia, Miriel has only seen Nicholas as a means of escape, and once out of the convent, the two part on bad terms. From this point forward, misfortune will plague Miriel's life until she runs into a new Nicholas, this time a famous soldier and merchant. Can the two now see past their pride and into each other's souls, formerly one and the same? Or have the ravages of a bloody war clouded their sight? (From Goodreads)
The Cover - I like this cover. My favourite thing about it is definitely the colour scheme. The whole greeny-orangey-peachy look is really working for me, and that dress would make an amazing Halloween costume!
The Review - This is the second Elizabeth Chadwick novel that I've read this year, and I honestly went into it with more than a little bit of trepidation. I read another of her books, The Greatest Knight, and while I did like it, I felt like it draaaagged on a bit too much to really be enjoyable. So I was hoping that I would like The Marsh King's Daughter a lot more. Luckily, I did! 
While this book is very much of a slower pace than most of the novels I usually read, it was honestly a nice change for me. Chadwick is obviously a very character-driven writer, and her stories reflect that. I love a good character based book, and the fact that there is actually a kernel of truth at the base of this one made it even more interesting! 
Focusing on the intersecting lives of medieval lovers Miriel Weaver and Nicholas de Caen, Chadwick weaves an intricate tapestry of intrigue, mystery, treasure, murder, love, and ingenuity, making for a full and absorbing tale. The one thing that I didn't understand about this novel, though, was the title! I mean, it may seem obvious to some, but where did the whole 'marsh king's daughter' thing come from? I know that the marsh played an integral part in the story, but still... I guess that reference is lost on me! 
The Marsh King's Daughter is a slow-paced and well developed narrative, filled with more than enough scheming and intrigue to hold your interest the entire time, and lead by an extremely likable,  shrewd heroine. Reading this book has showed me that I should always be willing to to give an author a second go, and I am very glad that I did.
An engrossing read. 3.5 Roses!

Mr Chen's Emporium by Deborah O'Brien - Review

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 Mr Chen's Emporium is an enchanting tale of forbidden love and following one's heart...

In 1872, seventeen-year-old Amy Duncan arrives in the Gold Rush town of Millbrooke, having spent the coach journey daydreaming about glittering pavilions and gilded steeples. What she finds is a dusty main street lined with ramshackle buildings.

That is until she walks through the doors of Mr Chen's Emporium, a veritable Aladdin's cave, and her life changes forever. Though banned from the store by her dour clergyman father, Amy is entranced by its handsome owner, Charles Chen...

In present-day Millbrooke, recently widowed artist Angie Wallace has rented the Old Manse where Amy once lived. When her landlord produces an antique trunk containing Amy's intriguingly diverse keepsakes - both Oriental and European - Angie resolves to learn more about this mysterious girl from the past.

And it's not long before the lives of two very different women, born a century apart, become connected in the most poignant and timeless ways. (From Goodreads)  I'll be honest with you here. Eventhough I live in Australia (and love it here!) I am not usually one toindulge in historical fiction set in my homeland. Something about the wholeconvict-filled, uncivilized bushland that was Australia pre-20th century (in my mind anyway) justdoesn't do it for me. I prefer my hist-fic Regency or earlier, thank you verymuch! So when I heard about Mr Chen's Emporium by Deborah O'Brien, Iwas initially hesitant to read it. But I was intrigued by the idea of anOriental oasis hidden away in an outback gold rush town, and I do love a goodtime slip novel, so I decided to read and review it. And I am so glad that Idid!
 Set in Millbrooke, a hidden countrygem of a town, Mr Chen's Emporium explores the loves and losses of twoheroines, 19th century Amy Duncan and modern day artist Angie Wallace. Bothcharacters were extremely likable and very well rounded, and I was absorbed inboth of their storylines, which is quite unusual for me with a time slip novel,as I usually find myself preferring one plotline over the other. That wasn'tthe case here. I loved that both women were strong, independent andself-assured, though I did find that I related better to Amy, but that'sprobably because she was young and just starting out in life like I am myself.
 The slow unravelling of Amy's lifewas a highlight of the book for me, and I often found myself racing through thepages to see what would become of her. She was such a vibrant character and Icould really feel her emotional struggle against her strict father and, withoutwanting to give too much away, I was so excited when she began to rebel! I alsoreally enjoyed seeing Angie begin to embrace life again and overcome the greatloss she suffered at the beginning of the novel; Millbrooke, in its own way,healed both ladies.
 Mr Chen's Emporium is anemotional and empowering novel, buoyed by its two fantastic female leads, andMillbrooke, which was almost a character itself. I was very nearly in tears bythe end of the book, and I found myself wishing that I lived in a town asinteresting and secret-filled as Millbrooke! The interconnecting stories andsubtle plot twists made for an absorbing, yet still comfortable, read, and I amdefinitely interested in finding out if the author has any other books out. Sothank you, Ms O'Brien, for inspiring a new found love of Australian historicalfiction within me! Gorgeous story. 4 Roses!

Thank you to Random House for sending me a copy. 

Prized by Caragh O'Brien - Review

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This review is going to be kind of hard to write... not because I didn't like this book (that totally wasn't the case!) but because it's going to be super hard to write a review that isn't full of spoilers! This is a seriously interesting series, and I'm just bursting to talk about all of the secrets that were revealed towards the end of the novel! But I don't want to be a series-ruiner, so I'll try and keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.  There will be some spoilers for book one, so if you haven't read Birthmarked yet you should probably skip this review!

Caragh O'Brien's Prized is the second book in her popular Birthmarked series. I'd read the first novel Birthmarked a while back and quite liked it, but with my TBR pile insanely huge, I didn't get around to reading Prized until now. Though I had mixed feelings about Birthmarked, Prized was definitely a pleasant surprise for me. I really loved it!
Prized picks up a couple of weeks after the end of the first novel, and straight away we're pulled right into Gaia's messed up dystopian world. Lost and alone with her baby sister, Gaia is soon rescued by the surprisingly sexy Peter and brought to the previously unknown village of Sylum. Though at first it seems like she might have finally found herself in a safe haven, Gaia (and the reader) soon discover that Sylum is a society with some major secrets, and the intrigue begins...
Gosh, what I really loved about this book was the pacing! The reader is kept just as much in the dark as main character Gaia is, and we're drip-fed the secrets of Sylum as slowly as she is. Though this may frustrate some readers, for me it really added interest to the novel, as my mind was always working, trying to figure out exactly what was up with Sylum and it's weirdo leader, just as Gaia was. There was a distinct feeling of unease present throughout the entire book which kept me turning the pages, eager to see what would happen next. 
The big secret of Sylum itself (which I won't mention here) was actually one of the most unusual plots I've come across in YA books these days. Without saying too much, I was so glad that it wasn't another society of vampires or some other supernatural secret that Gaia uncovered. Seriously, I'm just so sick of paranormal creatures in YA lit at the moment! And did I mention the fact that Sylum is run by a pack of power-hungry bad bitches?! I do love a bit of misandry in my YA novels, muahaha.
I also really liked the introduction of not just a love triangle, but a love square. Damn Gaia, you go girl, attracting all the hotties in that weird backwards town! I am so Team Will, though I'm not sure if anyone else is with me on that! I was happy to see Leon in this book as well, though he's pretty much as big of a douchebag as he was for the majority of the first book, though he does have his moment (the firefly field, anyone?!). 
Overall, Prized is a big improvement on the first novel in the series, and it left off on such a hopeful, bittersweet note that I know I will be reading the third book in the series, Promised, a lot sooner than I did this one.

Don't Make a Scene: (500) Days of Summer

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The Story: I loved (500) Days of Summer.  It rang of truth to me, not the myth of Hollywood Romance which a lot of us now take for "love," (and it could be, if they didn't cut the bad bits out, or end it at the best "Happily Exit After").  For one thing, it exploded the rom-com "given" that the girl is going to be the one head-over-heels for the guy.  Here, the guy is all gooey-romantic to the point where he can't see straight, certainly where she's concerned.  It also nicely tweaks the "soul-mate" myth...or "the one" (you know, who's been waiting all your life, to be the perfect match, out of the billions of people in the world).

Only a "guy" could believe a concept that dumb.  That there's "one."  The only other person who could believe something so silly would a "girl."  Either one, would have to be "romantic" enough (or should we say "particular" enough, or "needy" enough, or "naive" enough)  to buy into the "soul-mate" nonsense.  It's building up the notion of attraction to folkloric heights of such scale and impossibility that it sets one up automatically to fail, either if "the one" doesn't work out, or if it is never attained.

And if it doesn't go right, it's devastating, prompting all sorts of odd behavior, either acting out or staying in (for example, the opening titles of the film, which calls out—then insults—some fictional "ex" of one of the film-makers). (500) plays with the concept, and manages to milk observational comedy out of it.  My favorite take-away was Tom's concept of love based on (as we're told) "a total misreading of...The Graduate," which, if one is paying attention, manages to question the viability of Ben and Elaine's "love-conquers-all" romance before the end of the second-to-last shot.  

Director Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-man) does not follow the scripters' advice to show Tom and Summer in split-screen right before their meeting, instead giving them their own spaces, joining them once in a distant pan of the greeting card company office where they both work.  They don't occupy the same frame or the same space (except in the "488" section) at this stage of the film until after we're informed "this is not a love story."

Which isn't really true.  It is a love story, but it's a love story born out of naivete and lack of experience and more of obsession.  Yes, there may be a "one and only" but one can only find their "only" within one's self, through commitment and character. 


The Set-Up:  No story yet.  This is the beginning of the movie.  Tom is Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Summer is Zooey Deschanel.

Action!


SIMPLE BLACK ON WHITE CREDITS ROLL TO BIG STAR'S "I'M IN LOVE WITH A GIRL." When all is said and done, up comes a single number in parenthesis, like so: 


(478) 

EXT. PARK - DAY



For a few seconds we watch A MAN (20s) and a WOMAN (20s) on a park bench. Their names are TOM and SUMMER. Neither one says a word.


CLOSE ON her HAND, covering his. Notice the wedding ring. 

No words are spoken. Tom looks at her the way every woman wants to be looked at. 

A DISTINGUISHED VOICE begins to speak to us. 

NARRATOR This is a story of boy meets girl. 

CUT TO: 

(1) 

INT CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY 



The boy is TOM HANSEN. He sits at a very long rectangular conference table. The walls are lined with framed blow-up sized greeting cards. Tom, dark hair and blue eyes, wears a t- shirt under his sports coat and Adidas tennis shoes to balance out the corporate dress code. He looks pretty bored. 


NARRATOR The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he'd never truly be happy until the day he met his... "soulmate." "the one."

CUT TO: INT LIVING ROOM - 1989 



PRE-TEEN TOM sits alone on his bed engrossed in a movie. His walls are covered in posters of obscure bands. From the TV, we hear: "Elaine! Elaine!" 


4. NARRATOR This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie, "The Graduate." 

CUT TO: INT OFFICE CUBICLE - PRESENT DAY


The girl is SUMMER FINN. She files folders and answers phones in a plain white office. She has cropped blonde hair almost like a boy's but her face is feminine and pretty enough to get away with it. 

NARRATOR The girl, Summer Finn of Shinnecock, Michigan, did not share this belief. 

CUT TO: INT BATHROOM - 1994 



Teenage Summer stares at herself in the mirror. Her hair extends down to her lower back.

NARRATOR Since the disintegration of her parents' marriage, she'd only loved two things. The first was her long blonde dark hair.



She picks up scissors from the counter and begins to slice.

NARRATOR The second was how easily she could cut it off... And feel nothing. 

CUT TO: SPLITSCREEN. INT BOARDROOM/ INT CUBICLE - SAME 



On the right side of the screen, Tom continues to listen to some boring presentation. On the left, Summer answers a call, takes a message, and walks out of her cubicle down a long narrow hallway.

5. NARRATOR Tom meets Summer on January 8th in a San Francisco office building. 


NARRATOR In an instant, he will know she's the one he's been looking for. 



CU Summer opening the door to the boardroom, about to come face to face with Tom for the first time.

NARRATOR This is a story of boy meets girl. 

But before they do, 

CUT TO: BLACK. 
NARRATOR You should know up front, this is not a love story.


(500) Days of Summer

Words by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber

Pictures by Eric Steelberg and Marc Webb

(500) Days of Summer is available on DVD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Stand Up Guys

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"We're Still Here!"
or 
"...End of Story" 

Oh, man, it's painful, the first few minutes of Stand Up Guys, the new gangster-with-gags film directed by Fisher Stevens.  Valentine (Al Pacino) is being released from prison after 28 years, for his part in a robbery that turned deadly.  On the outside, waiting for him, is Doc (Christopher Walken), who was also part of that robbery but managed to stay out of the gray-bar hotel for reasons unknown and is now "retired," spending his free time being a diner habitué and painting landscapes.  

Doc takes Val home to his apartment, which the ex-con compares unfavorably to the accouterments he has recently vacated.  At this point in the movie, Val announces that he wants "to party," at which point I resisted an urge to get up and get popcorn.  It wasn't going to be pretty, whichever way it was played, comedy, bathos, or weirdness.  The obligatory visit to a whorehouse is somewhat lightened by Lucy Punch (a Brit actress playing a longish Island accent) as the daughter of the madam these guys used to know in their and her prime.

Things don't go well (nyuk, nyuk) so Doc and Val rob a drug store (very easily)—Val gets little blue pills and proceeds to take too many of them, and Doc has some expensive prescriptions he needs to supplement—complications arise, so to speak, which requires a trip to the hospital, where Julianna Margulies provides an "E.R." flashback and informs the two about her father, their former getaway driver, who's stuck in a nursing home.

Alan Arkin plays that character, and it's at that point that the movie picks up with a couple quick chase sequences and a needed pivot point for the Pacino-Walken dynamic.  The movie gets better with Arkin's presence, even though one can't say it improves.  But Arkin's added energy manages to lift the movie over the speed-bumps that the script-cliché's drop in the path.  Where Pacino is manic and Walken is passive, Arkin manages to bridge the gap (and their vocal pauses) with a complacent nervousness that bounces off both actors entertainingly.

It's unfortunate watching, really.  To see these gold-standard actors (all Academy Award winners, not that that really matters) reduced to mining what they can out of a vein of tin is disheartening, no matter what smiles they can produce out of it.  Something could have been done, recent examples of the story-form being In Bruges and Going in Style.*  But just the casting of these young-now-aging turks can't make this one any more than it is, a faded half-hearted comedy about aging gangsters that might have been enough to re-team Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau back in the day.

This is a minor, minor, minor film with major talent in it that eventually makes the most of the material, but can't elevate it into something worthwhile or even makes a statement.  And, frankly, I'm getting too old for movies like this.

Stand Up Guys is a Rental. 

* Martin Brest's 1979 comedy-drama about over-the-hill retired thieves trying to supplement their meager Social Security—Pacino surely knew about it, as it starred his mentor, Lee Strasberg.