Just perfect...

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Paymer, Charles Durning, Julia Stiles, and Rebecca Pidgeon star in "State and Main," a 2000 film written and directed b David Mamet.Macy is the director, Walt Price, of a film shooting on location. For reasons not disclosed, they've been run out of one small town and now are in another one in Vermont. With him are his writer, Joseph Turner White,(Hoffman), heretofore a playwright, his stars (Baldwin & Parker), and various other assistants, cameramen, etc.The name of the film is "The Old Mill" and the exciting thing about this town is that it actually has one. Well, it had one - they find out it burned down. This is actually the least of their problems. The female star refuses to bare her breasts, though someone comments that most of America can draw them from memory; then she holds them up for $800,000. The male lead likes underage girls and gets in a car accident with one in the car. Unfortunately, the writer is a witness, and due to the influence of a townswoman, Ann, he has fallen for (Pidgeon) he wants to maintain his integrity.The Mayor (Durning) is willing to turn over the whole town to them seemingly for free until someone finds out it would cost $6 million to build a set of the town, so all the playing up to the Mayor seems to be for nothing. And an attorney, ex-fiancé of Ann's, is ready to extract revenge on the company by legal means. Meanwhile, the wife of someone on the crew is having a baby, White can't type because he caught his finger in a fish hook, and the Price keeps asking for the scene where the horse dies. When White says, "You know you can't kill a horse," the director's angry answer is "f--- me." I'm sure some of this is very true to life, especially the director being hounded from all sides constantly and having to put out a million fires. Also the cover-up of the accident I'm sure has happened. The movie captures the awe that townspeople have when Hollywood types come in to make a film, as well as the self-indulgence of the actors.Most of the time, the film was pretty funny. It's not Mamet's best by any means. It's a light story with some very good performances, particularly by Macy, who plays a determined director who pretends to be nice to perfection, and Hoffman, who walks around in a dream world on his first film. Baldwin nonchalantly gives us the narcissistic essence of his character, and Parker is a riot acting as if she's being asked to commit murder instead of something she's done a million times.The end shouldn't come as any surprise. I would say this is atypical Mamet that, had it not been for the stars, could have been a TV movie.

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!)

Having read the reviews that some IMDb contributors made, I was looking forward to this movie. I should have known better. The morally bankrupt set that is making movies these days is not able to produce anything that isn't loaded with sex, twisted liberal values and thoroughly rehashed rubbish. My problem with began with the end-of-reel flickering style opening credits which were annoying along with the music played. Virtually all the characters are stereotypes:1). the temperamental leading lady who is more diva than artist2). the lecherous leading man who can't keep his hands off 14 yearold girls3). the crooked politician well, you get the idea. Sure there are some clever lines here and there but on the whole this movie stinks and is illogical to the point of absurdity. For example, the leading lady won't expose her breasts but strips naked in the lead writer's hotel bedroom before he can close the door. The writer is supposed to be a Jew but has a WASP name. What's he hiding? Frankly, I'm getting fed up with this sort of rot that passes for humor. It should come to no surprise that the townspeople succumb to Hollywood's degenerate values by the end of the movie. Hey, why not? Look who produced this trash.

The first hour is quite entertaining so it's quite a pity that Mamet chose to ruin the movie with the totally lame last third. (He also half-ruined "Homicide" with an illogical ending.) Instead of continuing the movie with the sort of fun satiric tone established by that point, he tries to moralize in a most pathetic old-school-Hollywood way.Hoffman is having second thoughts about how he will testify, just because he cares so much about the truth and because a sudden rush of patriotism devours him! Even worse: Hoffman is supposed to be a likable character, but in fact he loses all MY sympathy when he decides to betray the entire film crew for some very skewed moral Americana reasons. Mamet has his morality all wrong, to say the least: he expects the viewer to identify with Hoffman's childish impulse to "be honest" and "tell the truth" even if doing so would only serve to ruin a whole bunch of people who are simply trying to get a film made, while at the same time promoting the career of a jealous, unsympathetic, ambitious politician! Of course, doing so would also ruin his own career, making him some kind of super-principled, likable martyr. Yeah, right... Pidgeon, who once again plays in a Mamet movie because no one else besides her husband would hire her (for obvious lack of talent), even encourages her boyfriend Hoffman to tell the truth; this makes HER unsympathetic, as well. So what have we got? The movie's love-couple is made up of two unlikable characters and the viewer is supposed to feel good about their happiness. Mamet also employs too many plot-devices that rely on coincidences, so much so that they eventually get annoying.The first hour is fun. The characters of the director, the producer, the main male star, and the main female star, are all well thought-out and amusing. Baldwin plays the typical male moron star who thinks with his penis, and it is a very amusing, clever premise that he has a weakness for under-aged girls. (Though, as I find out later, Mamet used it only because he wanted to create that legal nonsense in the last part of the movie.) Parker plays the typical, over-sensitive, spoiled bimbo actress who causes a ruckus about showing her breasts in a scene. In fact, the best scene in the movie is when the producer (a very likable character) roasts Parker about her contractual obligations. Then again, maybe Mamet - in his infinite lack of moral vision - expects us to dislike the producer and the director, who are, ironically, presented more sympathetically than probably 95% of all real-life producers and directors.This is no "Living In Oblivion". Well, apart from the fact that Mamet seems to live in a moral oblivion. Instead of finishing the movie the way he started it, Mamet opts for trite plot-twists that offer little comedy and make little sense. The casting is also a problem to an extent. Hoffman is far too unsympathetic and uncharismatic to play a likable lead character - especially when the character ironically isn't even likable thanks to Mamet's idiotic sense of what is morally right - and his love-interest is played by a Pidgeon who, though having improved on her acting somewhat, hasn't got much charisma. (She was far worse in "The Spanish Prisoner".) Parker, though a solid actress, is simply too unattractive to play a Hollywood star. (Then again, considering how many female 90s stars are ugly (Diaz, Barrymore, Roberts) maybe she isn't that ugly, after all.) The rest of the casting is good. In the end-titles the voice behind "Dr.Katz" can be heard (David Mamet was a guest on the show in an episode).