State and Main

Rating:
Summary: Good, But Not For Everybody
Review: State And Main is a well crafted, wonderfully put together satire on Hollywood. It has a great cast and direction. But, is not for everyone. This movie is very in your face. It can be sorta crude and annoying as well. But that's what these characters need to be. There is not one likeable character in this movie. That's a nice change of pace. Some of the dialogue and jokes are so different that it might be hard for some people to really get into. It's a thinking comedy. It's not really a laugh out loud type of film. Anyways, the storyline has a film crew, headed by temperamental director William H. Macy, setting up shop in a very Norman Rockwell-ish town to make a movie. And,
needless to say, the cultures between hollywood filmmakers and small town people, clash. Clash horribly. The wonderful supporting cast includes : Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Stiles, Charles Durning, Patti LuPone, and Rebecca Pidgeon(Mamet's wife). This is a good movie that is just not easily enjoyable. Does that make any sense?. Oh well. State And Main is a nice effort.

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievably boring.
Review: Not funny. Not interesting. Not clever. Not anything. I'm not even going to finish watching this dog before returning it to Blockbuster. A great cast...with nothing to do.

Rating:
Summary: Awful
Review: How does it happen that a cast as terrific as this can be poured into a script as worthless and empty as State and Main? I do not have the space here to convey the awfulness of the pseudo-enigmatic dialogue; the feebleness of the one-liners; the pretension of the attempts at cleverness; the in-your-face vulgarity that subtitutes for satire; the palpable uncomfortableness of talented actors in roles that they barely know what to do with, spouting lines that they simply can't make sound natural. William H. Macy does his best with the ludicrous, mannered dialogue he is lumbered with, but there is no escaping the cage of pretension Mamet has him penned within.

In an attempt to create a funny movie, Mamet seems to have adopted the policy of throwing enough mud at the wall in the hope that some will stick. Almost all of his one-liners fail utterly, and there are whole passages of dialogue that make no sense at all. The characters that you just know you are meant to find engagingly eccentric are just plain annoying after a matter of minutes. A washed-out, watery, unoriginal 'satire' with no style, no class and no invention, every nut and bolt of which has all been done before.

Rating:
Summary: not very funny comedy
Review: **1/2 David Mamet’s “State and Main” is what “Our Town” might have been had it been conceived by a clear-eyed, modern day cynic. In this tale, a Hollywood film crew invades the idyllic hamlet of Waterford, Vermont, determined to capture on celluloid the simple bucolic virtues of a bygone era. The only problem is that those involved with the making of this film-within-a-film lack the requisite innocence themselves to do justice to the theme they purport to be exploring. They are all typical products of the crass Hollywood culture – boorish, self-obsessed and thoroughly amoral. All except the writer of the piece that is, Joseph Turner White (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the one character who is not only in touch with his cravings for a return to innocence, but who passes the moral test laid out for him along those lines at the end.

“State and Main” is a clever film, a cute film, a likable film – it just isn’t a very FUNNY film. The Mamet specialty – flat, monotone, emotionless line readings – becomes grating and irritating after awhile. Both the small town rubes and the big city elitists come across as little more than tired stereotypes who really don’t have anything particularly funny to say. As a result, most of the attempts at humor simply fall flat. We’ve seen these characters and situations countless times before – the temperamental star making exorbitant financial demands, the lecherous leading man endangering the production with his reckless sexual dalliances, the harried producers and directors fighting a constant transcontinental phone battle with demanding studio heads “back on the coast.” And it just isn’t all that interesting. Part of the problem, I think, is that Mamet never really exploits or explores the setting he’s chosen. Most of the townsfolk emerge as minor, background characters at best, with the possible exception of Rebecca Pidgeon as Annie, Joe’s eventual love interest. Pidgeon, who looks uncannily like Marlo Thomas in her “That Girl” days, seems sweet as all get out, but the atonal delivery of most of her lines hampers the interest we might otherwise find in her character.

Actually, none of these characters are very interesting – or very funny. In fact, most of them seem rather [boring] when you get right down to it, and Mamet fails to provide the satirical wit and bite that would mitigate some of their unpleasantness. He doesn’t generate the kind of out-and-out, hearty laughter that Christopher Guest derived from his examinations of rural America in movies like “Waiting For Guffman” and “Best of Show.” Mamet’s take is, in many ways, so cynical that he seems to have forgotten to engender the kind of affection for his people that helps keep condescension at bay. Or, perhaps, it is really so much simpler than that – maybe he merely neglected to write any truly funny material.

Rating:
Summary: David Mamet makes pretty good film - relief all round
Review: While I admire many of David Mamet's plays, I've yet to be convinced that he knows more than my 4-year-old nephew about how to direct films. Film buffs and theatre folk tend to revere his work, and I am a bit of both, but you only have to watch them with normal people to see how robotic and cold his films can be - "Homicide", "House of Games", "Oleanna", all are spoiled by the strangely disassociated behaviour of his actors, and his version of Terence Rattigan's "The Winslow Boy", while competent, wasn't a patch on a BBC TV version starring Jeremy Brett and Emma Thompson.

All the more surprise, then, that this is a cool, funny, relatively relaxed (for him) movie. Even his wife Rebecca Pidgeon, usually the worst offender in terms of patented Mametian woodenness, loosens up a bit. Films about film-making tend to be a bit of a busman's holiday, and this is no exception, but there is a generally unbuttoned and charming feel to the whole thing that makes you forgive a lot.

The message, cause despite what Mamet would like to think, there is one, is unsurprisingly unoriginal - small-town folk are More Real than those Hollywood Weirdos. But it's lovely to see Philip Seymour Hoffman, usually cast as a sweaty, giggling deviant, as the romantic lead. William H. Macy, an old Mamet crony, is his usual excellent self, and Alec Baldwin does a lovely line in planetarily self-absorbed comedy. Even Sarah-Jessica Parker, who normally I can't stand, is a scream as the starlet who won't get her kit off for the camera but is perfectly happy to do it for the screenwriter.

The plot is given far too much attention. With a movie like this, we care more about incidental moments, or at any rate moments that _seem_ to be incidental - and Mamet is such a control freak, he can't stand it if our eyes are distracted from anything but the Development of the Story and the Revelation of Character, etc. etc. I'll never believe he's a real director. But he has, at last, delivered a fun film, even if I don't know how he did it. So fair play to him, as we say in my town.

Three stars, because good as this is, there a lot of other films out there, by people less respected and famous, which are a lot better. But if you've already seen them, try this.

Rating:
Summary: Mamet the Magic Storyteller
Review: David Mamet brings his perfect understanding of plot to this charming little comedy about the clash between stereotypical New Englanders and stereotypical high-powered Hollywood. Philip Seymour Hoffman is wonderful as the wide-eyed first-time screenwriter steamrollered by Hollywood; William Macy, a genius as always, is also great as the director trying to keep his fractured cast and crew together to actually try and make some art. I think Mamet is one of the best director/screenwriters out there, but I think of him as a grim realist. I was pleasantly surprised to see he can be truly funny as well. Even my wife liked it, and she wasn't a theatre major. You will too.

Rating:
Summary: Simply Terrific Writing
Review: I thought that this movie was impeccably written from the first line to the last line. Just when you think that the movie is becoming predictable, the Mamet provides enough of a twist or turn to get you hooked again. Bill Macy plays a terrific stereotypical hollywood film director who will do whatever is needed to get the shot right. The interplay between Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Rebecca Pidgeon is perfect. Alec Baldwin is great too. I must say that the only performance that was not believable was Sarah Jessica Parker portraying an actress who would not do a nude scene <grin>.

A true delight from start to finish!

Rating:
Summary: Unfunny & Predictable
Review: I know that one of Mamet's favorite character's had to be the one filled by the increasingly annoying Rebecca Pidgeon. She ruined the film for me with her smug acting & the unfunny quips she was given to perform. Alec Baldwin & William H. Macy were great as always, but sadly for me Phillip Seymore Hoffman's performance was rather stale. I seriously wanted to walk out of the theatre (and I never have before in my life walked out of a movie), but I kept telling myself "it has to get better...c'mon it's gotta get better," and it never did. I work at a video store and I try to prevent all my customers from renting this doggy-doo landmine.

Rating:
Summary: Not even a 1!
Review: Very pretentious look at how film people behave when doing their thing. There are far better examples out there (Day for Night comes to mind). The movie would have been barely passable thanks to the presence of William H. Macy (always great) or Sarah Jessica Parker (playing the role of a bad actress very, very well). However, the insufferable dialogue between Rebecca Pidgeon and Philip Hoffman ruins the movie. I could not get over how affected these characters were. Do people REALLY talk to each other that way? This movie gets a zero in my book.

Rating:
Summary: Irritating, Yet Funny
Review: Perhaps I watched this movie at the wrong time in my life. I may never know. But I have oddly mixed feelings about 'State and Main'. The first bits of the movie are hilarious, pure gold, but now I'm thinking that it's only because of the fresh and unique way in which the story is written and directed. Plus the great acting. After the initial "Wow, this is something different!", however, the movie gets predictable and tedious. And almost irritating. All I can in it's defense is this: the acting is superb. Julia Stiles is a gem, William H. Macy makes this movie, and Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker are very good as the spoiled, immature movie stars. Besides that, the movie is an odd combination of "Good, Unique, and Refreshing" and "Bad, Predictable, and Irritating".