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Fresh and Exciting

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

This line is in the movie and applies to it perfectly. It's even closer: Al plays a great actor in decline and it's exactly what's the movie turns to be: Al in decline or more accurately Al in a really bad movie. Indeed, this production is the usual BS that Hollywood feds up with since a couple of years: awful orange / blue grading: maybe it's a bit less exaggerated here as there is some beautiful natural light but when the grass is green, i still don't want to see it brown. the gay character: in the 80s, every family movie needs to have a dog; in the 2000s, every American movie needs a lesbian or fag: they are so much everywhere that you could expect it's the norm now. the shrink character: as the previous one, this one seems also inescapable and it's rather a gloom verdict: in American movies, it seems that personal problems means psychiatric ones and to have a better life, you must be cured by those incredible medicine officers! This analysis arises indeed when the character fails to work... Did the writer ever heard about economy and being old ????the wealthy character: forget the old ordinary, working people, now Hollywood stars want only movies that matches their lifestyle and you wonder why the budget are so important! the narcissus behind the scenes: Hollywood doing movies about actors, movies is just the ground 0 of imagination, filmmaking! With all their money, they are shameful lazy to bring new ideas! the amoral romance with a Grandpa and a young woman: Here the age difference is 43 years and they mall call it love, i call it light incest: it's like a Dad sublimates his pulsation with a surrogate daughter. I remember to have watched a stinker like this recently (Elegy with Pénelope) and i'm not surprised it has the same pitiful (and old) writer Roth! So with all that BS, it was painful to watch Al, all the more that he was doing comedy for one time! His Shakespeare moments are also great because he is really into that and i suppose that we are really close to the real Al (messy hair, slumped, bad dark dressed) but at the end, this movie is rather disgusting! Actually, with a feeble Spielberg (bridge of spies) and a poor Al, we must realize that American movies are in big crisis if not in total decay and fresh air, new ideas must come in if they want to inspire again!!!

Actor Simon Axler (Al Pacino) is losing his mind and falls off the stage. He vows never to go on stage again. He's an insomniac and alone in the world. He misses while trying to shot himself. He gets himself into a clinic with Dr. Farr (Dylan Baker). After getting out, he's visited by a theater friend's daughter Pegeen Stapleford (Greta Gerwig). She has had a crush on him since childhood and is now a lesbian. He has a sexual relationship with her despite being her godfather as various people come to challenge it. There is also fellow patient Sybil who keeps hounding him to kill her husband.Al Pacino shows that he still has it. He never lost it. He just hasn't had big hits lately. Al Pacino is actually good at dead pan humor. The stuff in between isn't as good. Gerwig is playing her usual flaky cute girl. It's a lot of wacky characters. There is a pervasive sadness with moments of great comedic outbursts.

Review: I really got frustrated and annoyed with this film because Al Pacino is chatting complete crap from the beginning to the end. I understand that the man is going through a mid-life crisis and he's finding hard to separate his stage acting to real life but the script is a right mess and I personally found it quite confusing. Al Pacino puts in a top performance, as usual, and he shows some deep emotion throughout the film but the film seemed pointless and I struggled to stay interested. The relationship with his best friends lesbian daughter was strange and sketchy, along with the weird girl who wanted him to kill her husband. This isn't as bad as Al Pacino's embarrassing moment in Jack and Jill when he's attempting to rap but it has to go down as one of his worse films. I don't know what the director was trying to attempt with the movie and the whole feel and flow of the film was awful. After waiting so long for Pacino to release a film, I am really disappointed with this bad attempt at an in depth look into a struggling actors career. I just hope that he comes out with something decent next time. Disappointing!Round-Up: What the hell has happened to Pacino? Since Scarface and the Godfather days, he has been one of my favourite actors but he has really made some crap lately. From the terrible Jack & Jill to the average Stand Up Guys and The Son Of No One, he isn't guaranteed to pull in a big audiences in the cinemas anymore. Part of it is due to the terrible movies that he has picked to star in and another part is that he actually over acts in some of his roles. Greata Gerwig put in a good performance, which must have been hard next to the Hollywood legend but she also seemed to be chatting rubbish most of the time. It was good to see Charles Grodin back on the big screen, who I loved in Midnight Run and Dave but the director didn't make the most out of the cast. I recommend this movie to people who are into their comedy/dramas about an actor whose going through a mid-life crisis and struggles to separate his stage acting to real life. 3/10

First please read maurice yacowar comments/review of this movie found here with the other comments & reviews. That is a wonderful insight to this complex character Simon Axler and this movie.I'm a fan of Greta Gerwig and her performance of Pegeen Mike Stapleford in this movie is almost as complex as the Simon Axler character. The story and characters seem to drift from reality into make believe into the psychotic and then suddenly back to reality. Where does the real and the imagined start and finish? It's all theatre.This isn't a movie for the soap opera crowd but instead it's for people who want to be absorbed into each character and this cast is just perfect in doing that.Why only 9 stars? I don't know!