Movies
Movies about making movies. Hollywood sure loves its frantic movie-making cliché. Art is chaos, nothing works, and in the end everything comes together and art happens. I've grown allergic to it over time, but State and Main has a couple of other perks that save it from damnation. A film crew lands in a small town after being shunned by another. They're shooting The Old Mill, but then they find out the town's Mill burned down almost 40 years ago. The scriptwriter is struggling to rewrite, the main actor's taste for young girls is becoming problematic and the female lead starts to question some contractual obligations. Macy and Hoffman add some flair to the cast, there is some witty dialogue and the more dramatic scenes aren't that bad either. It makes for an entertaining watch, but it's not enough to keep it among my personal favorites. Taste evolves and the more you watch, the more you crave films that manage to stand out. Still, it's good fun if you haven't seen it yet.Read all
An 80s thriller that garnered some praise back when it was first released. Looking at it now, it's hard to see what people saw in this film. It felt like a very generic thriller, a poorly produced shelf filler with very little appeal beyond its obvious genre traits. And since I'm not that big on crime/thrillers as a genre, there was very little here to keep me entertained. Margaret is a famed psychiatrist, whose book did really well. One day a man approaches her, asking Margaret if she can help him conquer his gambling debts. She accepts and decides to join him on one of his nights out. What she doesn't realize is that it is a setup by some conmen in order to teach Margaret a lesson. But the deceit runs deeper still. The crooked dialogues seem to be somewhat on purpose, but Crouse handles them particularly badly. Not sure why she was cast as the lead, but she does a terrible job. The styling is also subpar, and for a film about conmen, it's all rather predictable. People with a thing for '80s crime may still get something out of it, but this relic clearly wasn't for me.Read all