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!)

itamarscomix In the hands of a director with a vision, State And Main could have been an excellent little film. Instead David Mamet directed it himself and it turned out to be remarkably mediocre, at best. The dialog is good, as Mamet's generally is, but the pace of the movie is terribly dull, and the delivery of the lines is completely flat, which is a shame considering it's filled with top-rate character actors, none of which reach their full potential. Being a sucker for films about filmmaking I really wanted to enjoy State and Main, and I did, at times, enjoy the satire and the observational humor, but it's better read than watched.

William James Harper 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.