State and Main: a film review

State and Main.

In a break from his usual heist-and-hostility routine, David Mamet brings us a movie about movies: temperamental talents, deeply hidden secrets, and the panic of production delays. The premise: the entire cast and crew of Hollywood production The Old Mill has been booted out of the small New England town where they’re filming. As the frantic director tries to hustle another town’s mayor into signing on as their new location, the clock is ticking away. And time is money, people.

Writer-director David Mamet’s dialogue is pointed, clever, witty, and utterly despicable. With its quick, smart humor and characters running the range from “wretchedly angst-ridden” to “utterly vile,” State and Main feels like an Aaron Sorkin show set in Hell. William H. Macy plays director Walt Price with whiplash virtuosity, slipping effortlessly between unctuous gladhanding and vicious rants. Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another masterful performance as the first-time screenwriter improvising like mad despite his almost total lack of confidence; Hoffman takes the sad-sack role and transcends it. Alec Baldwin delivers one of his nastiest comic roles as the big-name movie star with a loathsome yen for under-aged girls.

And here’s a sneaky little in-joke: the small-town mayor (perfectly played by Charles Durning) is named George Bailey — a poke at Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. As Mamet no doubt knows, Capra’s view of small-town life was far from the whitewashed sentimentality we celebrate in the film today. It’s a Wonderful Life gave us a glimpse of village life’s underbelly, and State and Main would like to pick up where Capra left off, plunging farther into the ghastly depths than Capra ever dreamed. With its vicious wit, its depravities, and its rapid-fire plot complications, State and Main is a screwball comedy of the darkest shade.

Delicatessen: a film review

Vividly textured, richly ambiguous, and darkly comic, Delicatessen opens in a ramshackle tenement hazily located in a French town in some unspecified dystopian future. Food is scarce, yet the butcher shop occupying the building’s first floor never seems to feel the pinch too badly.

I think you see where this is going… but the new tenant does not. His name is Louison (played by oddly charming rubber-faced actor Dominique Pinon), he’s a former circus performer, and he delights the neighborhood children with his clowning antics, which are cartoonishly impressive. Indeed, all of Delicatessen has a cartoonish quality that meshes weirdly but successfully with its grubby, dark setting and its gruesome premise.

This is the first feature film of co-directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who also co-directed the great City of Lost Children. Jeunet is now perhaps best known as the director of Amélie, and it’s easy to see Amélie as the indirect descendant of the grotesqueries of Delicatessen. Both films immerse themselves in a whimsically embroidered narrative built around the laborious quirks of its characters, and does so with an aplomb that magically weaves a potentially overwrought, incoherent mess into a beautifully balanced composition of humor, compassion, sorrow, and wonder.

habits

To make you even happier that you don’t live with me, allow me to list a few habits that enliven our tv time:

When someone on screen has cake, remark “They have cake.”

Make note of particularly galling (non-food) product placement with the complaint, “Aw, now I’m hungry for a Motorola cell phone.”

When watching an especially enticing setting or situation, announce “I want to go to there.” (Sometimes this results in a double-play: “They have cake. I want to go to there.”)

When the detective presents a blurry photo to a lab tech or scans it into an intricate machine, anticipate the inevitable (and technically impossible) sequence in which blurry photo is magnified to impossible clarity; repeat “Enhance. Enhance. Enhance.”

Whenever the Brooklyn Bridge appears in the background of a tv show, point at screen and in a matter-of-fact tone announce “Cloverfield monster.”

picture your sandwich

In celebration of Sesame Street‘s 40th anniversary, here’s a great argument for making your Sandwich Party sandwich at home instead of ordering it in a restaurant.

Mr. Bean does not endorse this message

In honor of the upcoming Sandwich Party, I give you “Mr. Bean Makes a Sandwich.”

[To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Bean does not endorse this message.]

Sesame Street sandwich

Sesame Street‘s “A Sandwich” lets us mingle our celebrations: hurray for the 40th birthday of Sesame Street and for the upcoming Sandwich Party!

I Love Lunch: The Musical

Brought to you by Improv Everywhere, here’s I Love Lunch: The Musical.

If you love lunch, join us Friday, November 27th, to Sunday, November 30th, for the fourth fabulous

a grand day

Not only is Sesame Street turning 40 this month, Wallace and Gromit turn 20! Many happy returns of the day!

sesame

Happy 40th birthday to Sesame Street! In celebration, I suggest you take a one-minute dance party and shake it to the pinball song.

pie

Halloween is over, and Thanksgiving is on the horizon. The good folks at Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn have posted five tips to help you prepare now for Thanksgiving; I have to admit that you’ll find the most useful hints in the comments, not the article.

This year, both our families’ Thanksiving plans are uncertain, and The Fella and I miiiiiiight have the chance to celebrate the holiday on our own, with a modest vegetarian feast and a cuddle on the couch. We’ve been cautiously daydreaming about the menu, each dish something special that one of us especially loves, and with The Fella’s squash galettes as the centerpiece.

Do you want to know the clincher, the moment when I went from idly daydreaming to hope-hope-hoping? It was during the conversation about pies: he wants pumpkin, I want blueberry, and neither of us wants a whole darned pie. And then I remembered my mini-pie tins, tucked away in a remote cabinet. This year, I want to be thankful for teeny tiny pies.