Join The Golden Boys for Kvetching and Kibitzing

You can feel yourself growing older in the 90 minutes it takes to watch this horrid piece of filmed dinner theater starring Rip Torn, Bruce Dern, and David Carradine as a trio of crusty former sea captains living under the same roof in 1905 Cape Cod. Based on a novel by Joseph C. Lincoln, the story turns–at about the pace of an arthritic hip–on the old coots’ efforts to recruit a “good woman” to cook and clean for them, but mostly, they sit around kvetching and kibitzing about nor’easters, clam fritters, and whose turn it is to do the dishes. The actors (who also include John Savage as a billiards hall owner and Charles Durning as a temperance-minded zealot) read their lines with the minimum energy required to keep up their SAG health benefits; only Mariel Hemingway (as the prospective woman of the house) impresses as something more than a reanimated corpse. Directed by one Daniel Adams, a straight-to-video vet whose credits include the forlorn Judd Nelson vehicle Primary Motive, the movie itself exudes all the period atmosphere of a Restoration Hardware knickknack. Even the Ladies in Lavender crowd at whom it is so shamelessly targeted may storm the box office, shaking their canes in revolt.