Motompa
Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.
Helllins
It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.
Hattie
I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
SnoopyStyle
Director Walt Price (William H. Macy) finds his new shooting location in Waterford, Vermont with the needed old mill after the previous small New Hampshire town made too many demands. Then he discovers the mill had burned down in 1960. Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is adapting his work and is forced to rewrite. His fan Annie Black (Rebecca Pidgeon) owns the local book store. She breaks up with Doug Mackenzie (Clark Gregg) who tries to bring down the production. Claire Wellesley (Sarah Jessica Parker) refuses to go topless for the movie. Leading man Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin) chases after local teen Carla (Julia Stiles). Studio producer (David Paymer) comes into town to fix the problems.Something about every one of these characters annoyed me. First of all, this cast is stacked. In a way, it's too stacked. Even the yokel locals are Hollywood veterans. It doesn't feel natural. Julia Stiles looks too old for what the character is suppose to represent. She does not look underage. She's young and pretty. Unless she's pregnant, there is no real scandal. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a great actor but his character is too naive. His cluelessness seems too artificial. Even worst, he has very little chemistry with the wooden Rebecca Pidgeon. Pidgeon is great at certain things but not as the romantic lead. Sarah Jessica Parker is also great but there is no way the producer would even consider backing down from her. There is a signed contract and they would sue her for the cost of the whole production. The resolution doesn't make sense because Hollywood is not about what happened. It's about showing the boobs. Time and time again, I feel like the story is almost there but it keeps doing something wrong. David Mamet is trying to make a fun romp but I didn't have much fun.
pontifikator
This is a very funny movie written and directed by David Mamet. His script requires some close attention, though, as the jokes are subtle and come at you out of left field.The cast is excellent: Clark Gregg, Charles Durning, Christopher Kaldor, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, David Paymer, and Rebecca Pidgeon, to name too few. The plot is tight, the dialogue is fast-paced, and the actors deliver with great precision and aplomb.Macy plays the director of a movie that has had to leave its earlier location for a reason that leaks out of the dialogue without ever being stated. And we watch as history repeats itself with the inevitability of history itself. Macy's character, Walt Price, is a lying, conniving, manipulative, unfeeling jerk that Macy keeps from being unlikeable by showing us that Walt _needs_ to be all those things to get the film in the can.Walt Price and his crew are trying to shoot a film in a small town in Vermont, where the residents are wowed by the attention. Mamet's script is a silent riot, as we see the rubes go from reading the local paper to Variety, all in the background, so if you're not paying attention to the background, you're missing a substantial part of the humor and foreshadowing of what's going to happen. Everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, so lawyers are brought in, cash is brought in, and love is brought in. Rebecca Pidgeon is great as the straight-faced, straight-talking love interest for Hoffman, and Hoffman delivers a great performance as Mamet -- the writer of art who gets the full Hollywood treatment and who must decide between love/art and seduction/corruption. As Hoffman's character keeps saying, it's all about purity.This is a very funny movie, and I wouldn't want to be an associate producer. (Oh, and be sure to watch through the credits and read them. Only 2 animals were harmed during the production of this movie!)
btm1
This very enjoyable witty and sophisticated parody of an independent motion picture company selecting a small town in Vermont as a location to make a major film, after being ejected from a small town in New Hampshire (for some unspecified bad behavior), is kind of a David Mamet family project. Mamet is credited as the writer and director. The most compelling character in the film, Ann, who owns and runs the town's book store and heads the town drama club, is played excellently by Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon. Her brother, Matthew Pidgeon, has a bit part as a British TV newscaster, Mamet's brother Tony plays an electrician. While on the subject of the cast, Broadway musical great Patti LuPone does a nice job, in a very minor role, as the small town Mayor's wife who apparently has high society ambitions and apparently money enough to back up that ambition. She is not someone you want to make angry because the Mayor (Charles Durning effortlessly playing a kind of mild- mannered role I've seen him in before) is also the Town Council. As long as his wife is happy he is thrilled to have the company use his town. Major movie star and heartthrob Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin), the male lead of the movie that the fictional film company is making, is an oblivious sex addict with a taste for underage girls. His activities are one of the major problems the film director (William H. Macy) and producers face. Another is that the lead actress (Sarah Jessica Parker), who was cast because of her contractual agreement to play a nude scene as she has done in several earlier films, has changed her mind. A third crisis for the producers has to do with the town's historic mill that was the main reason they chose the town, and a fourth is a splendid stained glass window that is in the way of a crucial camera shot.I would have preferred that the film had a different title than " State and Main." Perhaps something such as "The Old Mill Set" or "Second Chance." I think I noticed two goofs in the film: When a date on the white board has to be written again because it is accidentally erased, it is clearly rewritten on the same date as the original. In a critical later scene it is at a different date. The other is Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the fictional first time screenwriter and author of the fictional book the fictional film is based on, says at one point that he has perjured himself although he knows at that time that he was not really under oath when he lied. When watching "State and Main," don't turn it off before the credits or you'll miss some of the wit.
jpschapira
I have, for seven years, been waiting to see this film. I always tell the story about the time I went with some friends to the cinema and convinced everyone to watch this film and once inside the theater everyone wanted to go because they didn't like what they were watching but I wanted to stay because I liked it very much. And because I think there's a time for movies and that they arrive when they arrive, I have just found David Mamet's "State and Main" and, luckily, I've liked it very much. Of course, it's a special movie, but not in the sense that it's not for everyone. It's an easy-going movie, with a clear and simple plot line, nice sceneries and a cinematography that doesn't take any risks; but I could merely recommend, with enthusiasm, that everyone who watches assume a commitment. What do I mean by this? Well, that if you pay more attention than usual you should really enjoy it. The thing is that "State and Main" is a movie about a movie, and it's written by David Mamet, fact that naturally makes it not 'any' movie about a movie. I'll take a risk and say that this is based on one of Mamet's plays (I don't know that for a fact), because it looks very theatrical, but with the exceptional cast (by genius Avy Kaufman) and Theodore Shapiro's shifting score, we quickly forget about it. We don't forget, however, what may originally have come from a play; and that's Mamet's use of language. From scene one, where a doctor encounters a patient on the street and Walt (William H. Macy) argues with his team about the place they've ended up in, the writer/director establishes a style in his screenplay that we feel throughout the whole ride and contains certain characteristics: sharp, witty, direct, humorous and, at surprising times, reflexive and profound. Walt is a director who comes to shoot a film to Waterford, Vermont; the place they've ended up in: the middle of nowhere. The fact that Waterford is a little town where everyone has a big smile on their faces and don't seem to have problems (Julia Stiles' perfect working teenager; Rebecca Pidgeon's kind and loving Annie; Charles Durning's mayor), helps to establish a contrast with the neurotic director and his Hollywood crew: the manipulative and unstoppable producer Marty (a wonderful David Paymer); the popular star with a 'thing' for minors Bob (the role Alec Baldwin knows by heart); the pretty and stupid popular actress (Sarah Jessica Parker, in the role that suits her quite well); and the character with which you should implement my recommendation of paying attention: the creative, insecure writer of the film, Joe, played by the Great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Stereotypes? Why not some of them? But Manet is so gifted that, instead of assuming a character is stereotyped, he gives them lines for us to recognize, through their personality, the stereotype they represent. This sound simple, but it's not. It's the same I try to say about "State and Main": it looks simple, and it can be; but it doesn't have to be if you want it to. If you want, you can put yourselves in Joe the writer's position and try to figure out the truth, whatever it may be. If you want, you can enter as an outsider to the world of making a film and what it has to offer; to the political aspirations and perspectives of a little town; to the tradition and the stories and the sense of home of a little town. Mamet knows all of these things, and here sometimes he takes a stand; he sometimes mocks, other times he praises, most of the time he makes no sense at all, but all the time he's showing these things to us, in any form you may want to take them. And what's what cinema essentially does?
