John O'Brian Movies

A family struggles to keep their business afloat as they're dogged by personal crises in this drama from writer and director Kevin Jordan. Frank Giorgio (Danny Aiello) is the owner of Giorgio's Lobster Farm, a seafood shop in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn. The store has been in the Giorgio family for generations, and Frank, who takes enormous pride in Giorgio's, has had ambitions of expanding the business by adding on a restaurant. However, the bank has called in the loan Frank took out to build the dining room during a business downturn, and he goes through a series of both funny and desperate efforts to keep the wolf from the door. Meanwhile, Frank's grown children -- son Michael (Daniel Sauli) and daughter Lauren (Marisa Ryan) -- are torn between their desire to help their father, their mixed feelings about the man who put his business ahead of his family while they were growing up, and the knowledge that he's too proud to accept their assistance. As the familial tensions mount, Frank's marriage to Maureen (Jane Curtin) has begun to collapse, as her love for her husband is outweighed by her desire to move on. Produced in part by Martin Scorsese, Brooklyn Lobster was a personal project for Kevin Jordan, whose own father owned a lobster business which was suffering severe financial problems when he began the film. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi