User reviews

This could remind one of a Steven Soderbergh snore fest. It is a lingering, slow moving, vaguely interesting story of the modern American condition that promises much but delivers almost nothing.

It is a character study of realistic people in a realistic situation forced to make difficult choices that come from a changing society. But it is all very vapid and the plot points are as unresolved and unanswered as is the finality of it all.

The ending is so anti-climactic and the "change of mind and heart" from the "villain" of the piece is just abrupt and embarrassing, as is the final narration that is nothing but consummate corn-pone. The storage of hazardous waste in a formerly hazardous to your health tobacco facility is the one and only irony and the film is just uninspired.

When I saw the movie had actors Colin Firth, Orlando Bloom, Amber Tamblyn, Patricia Clarkson participating I thought this would be a movie worth watching, unfortunately I was mistaken.

While the actors do a good job with what they were provided with, the movie does nothing for them, it is a go nowhere movie that to me was a complete waste of time, thankfully not a huge amount of time to waste considering the length of the movie.

I have long been a big fan of Colin Firth and generally seek out movies that he is in. Unfortunately, while I felt he did a good job I think he made a bad choice with this one.

4 out of 10 for me.

I watched to the end, so it wasn't "that bad", as I saw the movie on a DVD at home and could have turned it off at any time. But that much said, it barely crossed my personal limit for "tolerable". The storyline is pretty dull and nothing can "fix" this. When you start with an uninteresting story, you get an uninteresting movie. I have no idea what Colin Firth was thinking to accept this part. I chose the movie because I figured he was a star and would surely only appear in a solidly good movie. I was wrong! Perhaps he thought it would be a challenge for him to play a character who is a Texan and felt this would give him a chance to break into being offered also roles for characters who are supposed to speak with American accents. He did quite well in terms of portraying a Texan, but that hardly compensated for a lack of an interesting plot.

"The company sent me to look for towns or cities that might benefit from our services. Durham was on my list." The town of Durham, like most cities has been hit hard by the bad economy. People are moving out and the unemployment rate is high. Gus Leroy (Firth) comes into town with a track record of helping towns recover and end unemployment. The town is unsure of his method, storing hazardous waste until it can be transported. This is another movie that proves that just because a movie has no CGI or explosions every five minutes it receives no marketing and the release it needs. This is a movie that is full of great actors and great performances. The plot is not that exciting, but the acting makes up for it. Colin Firth does a fantastic job in this movie of playing a guy who you aren't sure of. The entire movie he keeps you on edge wondering if he is really as good as he seems. Much like "Company Men" this is a movie that is a serious subject that sounds boring when you read it, but the acting makes it great. A must watch. Overall, a great movie filled with great acting that deserves a bigger audience then it will get. I give it an A.

Would I watch again? - Yes I would.

*Also try - Company Men

Review: Personally, I couldn't see the point of this movie. All the way through the film I thought that there was going to be a major twist, especially with Firth's character, but nothing really happens. Its about a small community which used to be the main producers for cigarettes and Firth company decides to rent some space in the town to store hazardous waste. The lady that he is renting the space from, has severe money problems and she is scared about losing her house so she is relying on the rental money to keep her house. Once her niece realises that the company is storing waste, she decides to take action but after a bad accident with one of the trucks that was transporting the waste, Firth decides to leave the business. I honestly found the movie cheap and really boring. The cast sounded promising, with Colin Firth and Orlando Bloom taking the lead, but the movie was a waste of time and money. The acting isn't that bad from the cast but I didn't like Bloom and Firth's terrible deep South accents and I didn't find any of the characters that interesting. I'm glad that the director didn't make it into a 2 hour epic movie because the storyline really does dry up after a while, which is a shame because it would have been half decent if there was actually a point to the characters individual stories. Disappointing!

Round-Up: After the successful Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, I thought that Orlando Bloom was going to be a major star but I haven't really seen him shine in any other movies. At the age of 38 he still has a chance to prove that he can really act, away from the big budget movies, but I'm yet to see him do anything that great. As for the award winning Colin Firth, this just has to go down as another bad day at the office but he really does need to make some better choices in the movies that he takes on. In this film, Bloom and Firth only really cross paths once so the director really didn't take advantage of the cast. He also could have made some use of Andrew McCarthy, who has been missing from the big screen for ages but he only had a little part which wasn't that memorable. At the end of the day, I really didn't enjoy this film but I will give it a couple of stars, just for Ellen Burstyn's performance.

Budget: N/A Worldwide Gross: $2,560 (Really Terrible!)

I recommend this movie to people who are into their dramas about a small town which is promised a prosperous future after a company rents an available warehouse to store hazardous chemicals. 2/10

I waited and waited for the plot to develop - to no avail. There seemed to be no point to this film; no in depth character development and more disappointedly, no story. Colin Firth, undoubtedly a superb actor where quintessential English characterisation is required, is appalling when cast as an American. His accent is shocking and comparable only to Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent in Mary Poppins!

The world has some brilliant English actors, and some brilliant American actors. Why does the industry insist on using UK actors to depict US characters and vice versa?

An absolute waste of time.

I was waiting for some kind of clever liberal message, as I do with almost everything I watch these days. I didn't really detect one. It's about an Operations Manager for a Hazardous Waste disposal company.

I don't know why the guy would have to travel all the way to Durham, NC for a warehouse and ultimately a processing center, but I guess there is only so much room in his home state of Texas. You probably know the story. This guy sets up these waste disposal centers in cities that could use the work and the revenue. He encounters some locals who then encounter each other.

As other reviewers have pointed out, Durham is not a small dying city. It has a couple hundred thousand people and is part of a thriving region. But this picture could have been set at an earlier time. There are no computers or smart phones, so maybe it is supposed to be earlier than 2010, although there is no indication of that.

Anyways, it is not about any of this. It's about hope, transition, renewal, and fear. Most importantly, it's about ordinary people. Having said that, these actors did an excellent job with the material. I too don't understand why they need to give the work to two Brits, but they did well.

As other reviewers have mentioned, you keep waiting for the Colin Firth character to turn into a slime, but he doesn't. He is genuine. The best part is when the young woman calls her ex-boyfriend a "loser" for staying in town and accepting a potentially humble life. You could see that a part of her meant it, and that he was deeply hurt, but also that she didn't really want to hurt anyone, and didn't fully believe what she said.

I loved the way they portrayed the ex high school sweethearts. Faced with the girl leaving town, the guy tells her straight out that he loves her and always has. That's what you have to do. Stake your claim. She reciprocated.

Ellen Burstyn could have easily relied on clichés, but she didn't. Her facial expressions and reactions set her performance apart from that. I don't get the ending. I won't give it away, but it seems like the guy is admitting that he was never comfortable doing what he does to begin with. He fooled me.

What a bizarre concept for a movie. That's why I like it. Because there is potential intrigue in the most mundane of circumstances. The main character mentions that a city's fate is dependent on how its' residents look at it. The same thing goes for a movie plot. You can turn a seemingly boring circumstance into something compelling with good writing, settings, and performances. They did that adequately here.

So it has some great actors, but after an hour and half you want to stick a pencil in your brain or somebody's brain for wasting your time. Now I was stuck watching it because the other inmates had chosen Prime this Tuesday evening. I begged to go back to my cell, but only one guard was available and he enjoys movies as exciting as watching paint dry, so we watched too. .

At first glance, MAIN ST. would seem to have all the ingredients for an absorbing piece - a top-notch cast (with two Brits doing very creditable Southern accents), a strong sense of place (Raleigh, North Carolina), and a taut, spare script by veteran Horton Foote. Then why is the movie such a disappointment? Its subject-matter is a pertinent one: the decline of American urban life and the schemes hatched by entrepreneurs to regenerate it, which might not necessarily please the existing residents. However the production is particularly slow-moving: the camera spends a long time focusing on tight close-ups of the protagonists, especially Ellen Burstyn as Georgiana Carr. This would be a perfectly acceptable strategy, were it not for the consciously showy nature of the performances: the actors are allowed to get away with the kind of theatrical gestures and facial movements that would not seem out of place in Victorian melodrama. As a result, we end up not really caring about the characters at all. Matters are not helped by the treacly soundtrack (from the normally reliable Patrick Doyle) that obtrudes itself on several occasions. Perhaps the material might have been better if another director had handled it.

Main Street is yet another liberal Hollywood message movie masquerading as entertainment. The dialog is lame and the message is lame. Their subplots are no more than sugar syrup to get you to swallow their progressive poison that "all technology is bad." Strip away all of the subterfuge and what do you have left? Recycling industrial waste is all bad! A true lie if I ever heard one. Obviously this movie was made to promote the progressive anti-industrial agenda by forming public opinion against recycling industrial waste. They don't tell you where the waste came from nor do they tell you what products or materials were manufactured to produce the waste. And they certainly don't tell you how many people earned an income generating this so-called evil waste.

Doyle and Foote must hate average Americans – assuming Americans are their intended target -- because of their underhanded use of illegal Hispanic laborers to foment hatred towards the evil industrial waste.

Why did Doyle and Foote choose an American town for this movie? I thought progressives had successfully driven away most manufacturing from this country? Oh I understand now. They want to form public opinion against building more nuclear power plants. So where does Doyle and Foote think we'll get the juice to charge up our electric cars? Then again, where will we find jobs to afford the $40,000 electric cars in the first place? If you think I spent too much time on the politics of this movie, then I have made my point.

A film without a soul and without a plot that results in a stalemate with a horrendous and useless awareness and banal closure of all the stories. This frighteningly pointless film tells a very banal story without suspense and without the slightest imagination of a man who wants to open a factory for the disposal of hazardous waste in a small town and then instead change his mind because the waste is obviously dangerous and instead in parallel there is the story of unrequited love between a policeman and a woman with whom he has been in love for a long time which obviously ends with her confessing that she loves him in a blaze of horrendous banality.

Great cast selection, but the plot isn't keeping my attention at all. I'm very disappointed. Colin Firth, Orlando Bloom, Amber Tamblyn, etc. All these names I know and like, yet this movie does not allow them to show us their best work.

Georgianna Carr (Ellen Burstyn) lives in a sleepy North Carolina town that has seen better days. Her father was a prominent businessman, in his day, and he kept a large warehouse for the tobacco farmers to store their product until it was manufactured into cigarettes and so on. That was long ago and this is now. Miss Carr is not wealthy and may have to sell her house. But, unbelievably, a Texan man, Gus Leroy (Colin Firth) wants to rent her warehouse and gives her six months rent in advance. Is this her way to keep her house? She agrees but finds out, too late, that he is storing hazardous waste, in government-regulated bins, until it can be properly disposed. Now, Miss Carr is so worried she asks her daughter, Willa (Patricia Clarkson) to help her find a way out. Meanwhile, Mary (Amber Tamblyn) a young twenty-something, beautiful lady discovers that the man she has been dating is married, technically, with two kids and won't seek a divorce until the children are adults. Whew! She contemplates moving to Atlanta, to the sorrow of Harris (Orlando Bloom) the town's sheriff who secretly, passionately loves her. Also, her parents are very reluctant to see her go as well. As to the warehouse, Willa tries to discuss things with Gus and finds out that they, both divorcees, may have a mutual attraction. Hey, this may not be a sleepy little town after all! When a heavy rain storm arrives, things get even more complicated. What will happen to these fine folk? Don't be fooled by the cover, with a smiling Mr. Firth in the center. This is not a light-hearted story but a fairly heavy look at a bevy of diverse topics. Among these are hazardous waste, aging Southern towns and the pursuits of the heart. The script, written by Horton Foote before his death, may have attracted the big name cast and they really are terrific. Firth has a genuine Texas twang so that's fun and Bloom sports a Southern drawl as well. More importantly, all of the principals give very touching turns. The small Dixie city has its charms, especially Miss Carr's house, and costumes, photography and direction are up to snuff. But, its generally a slow-moving, reflective film so not everyone will appreciate its better qualities. If you think you will, go for it.

Definitely the worst movie of the year so far. People still get paid for this garbage!? Further proof that the movie industry is nothing more than a joke at this point. How and why does the United States of America continue to allow people to make money for pathetic trash such as this!?!? These actors aren't very good, I've seen Amber Tamblin is several other movies, none of which were very good at all. Ellen Burstyn, come on lady what are you like 90? Just die already... Colin Firth, certainly the most overrated actor of this generation. Nice moustache on Orlando Bloom too (haha, when will that bum give himself a clean shave?) Truly horrendous film, not sure if any of these actors or even the film industry as a whole will be able to recover from this one.

As others have indicated, this was an amazing ensemble cast wasted by a truly poor script. But, I think the biggest issue here is the outdatedness of the issues identified. In the world of 2010 United States several factors are just wrong in this film.

I am wondering if Horton Foote actually wrote this script in the 1970's or 80's when the issue of Hazardous Waste was front and center. Yes, we still have concerns, but the use of nuclear energy is almost a given in our day and age. We rarely hear of hazardous waste spills, as the technology has so improved. We recognize that the risks often outweigh the benefits of a cleaner environment, but it is our reality until we can effectively convert to wind or solar energy to a large scale. The public demand, although present, just is not strong enough to get this job done. Therefore, hazardous waste is simply a fact of life today. In this script, I find Gus's fears of a spill far from believable, and cannot imagine him acting in the way presented.

In addition, Mary's issues as a woman are truly outdated. First, we are no longer the mobile society we once were. People do not just leave to find work in other cities. A woman like Mary would be much more inclined, in today's world, to stay in her home town and become an entrepreneur. Women do have more options today. Also, losing her job for not sleeping with the partner at the law firm is just so passé. In our world of diversity training and liability, Mary would win hands down in a lawsuit. In Main Street no one even blinks when she is fired for being unhappy about sexual harassment. Give me a break!! And, as for her calling Harris a potential loser, $30,000 as income for an entry level cop doesn't sound really all that bad! And, if Harris is planning to become an attorney in the Raleigh/Durham area, it sounds like he has a very good future. Mary's leaving, therefore, is questionable!

Bottom line for me, although I agree the script was pretty boring, I can imagine actors very interested in one written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. But, watching this film, I felt like I was watching one of the preachy films of the 70's or 80's. It's biggest sin being it's irrelevance.

As previous reviewers have synopsized the plot, I will not do that. The number of negative reviews is surprising, especially since most of those have no clue what this movie is about. And, their lack of insight is what leads them to think it is simple and uninteresting. Nothing could be further from the truth for movie-goers who are more interested in humanity than in over-wrought drama (e.g., serial killers, absurd disasters, cartoonish fantasies, etc., etc. -- save me from "Hollywood")that offer no real insight into our humanity.

Here is what this movie is about: the "hazardous waste" is pure metaphor for our fears: our fears of the future, of technology, of the unknown. The question this movie poses so clearly and powerfully is: how should we confront the fear of the future, which is inevitably one of confronting the nature of what our humanity involves: technology and change? And, it does have an answer, with which I could not agree more -- and with which I would hope anyone watching this movie would also, easily or not, come to agree.

Just as "To Kill a Mockingbird" was about our fears of others who are unknown to us and with whom we have no real experience, this movie asks us how we react to the unknown: Do we flee, or do we stand and make something out of whatever it is we have? The heroes in this movie do the latter and show those who would do otherwise the way forward ... which is what the best in our humanity always does, after all.

Orlando Bloom's character's mother (Mrs. Parker) and his erstwhile girlfriend's mother (Miriam) are afraid of the future and want to withdraw, hunker down. They have no will for their children to overcome. Orlando Bloom's character deals with the uncertain future by working hard to make something good of it. His girlfriend's character wants to run away.

Ellen Burstyn's character is caught in the middle of a dilemma: trust the unknown that offers progress and salvation, or give in to something safely predictable by selling out. In the end, she let's go of what is truly in the past (her home) and embraces what it is that offers hope for the future (the warehouse).

When our cities, our lives, our civilizations appear to be crumbling, what works: retreating from the challenge? Or, embracing new, uncertain, potentially scary things (metaphorically -- yes, metaphorically -- represented by nuclear waste)? This movie deals powerfully with those who would point to every "problem" on the way to the future (e.g., Fukushima) as a reason to retreat rather than as a lesson to learn, a problem to overcome. It basically says: accidents will happen: some good, some bad; get over it by learning from them and moving on. Imagine humanity retreating in the face of all the disasters it has encountered on the way to its current future? We would be still chipping flint with a lifespan of less than 30 difficult years.

Yes, this movie makes plain that Luddites are much to be feared, as are those who believe that "corporations" are bad and industry is almost certainly hiding are all sorts of horrible things. Instead, this movie says that we humans are, on balance, good. If we do not give in to our fears we can overcome those among us who would give in. By moving ahead (not by retreating or running away) we can overcome the challenges we create for ourselves because our very nature is to overcome. We are tool makers. We are proactive. We want good things for our children. Those who are destructive among us are a minority and will be overcome. But, do not fear what we are. Do not fear technology. Do not fear the way we organize our abilities to trade our best efforts with each other (i.e., industry, corporations, technology, progress).

Typical "Hollywood types" will not like this film because it counters every one of their most cherished beliefs: that Western Civilization, in its current most fully-realized form, is almost certainly bad for the humanity in us. Instead, it shows that our humanity is most realized when we trust ourselves to use our knowledge to give us what it will. After all, we (and I mean all 7 billion of us) would not be living longer, more satisfying, more comfortable lives than our predecessors in the 18th or 19th centuries had we not done so before now.

Beyond the point of the movie, the plot is one that could not be more satisfying in its simplicity or more poignant. These are real people leading real lives that many among us have led. No serial killers, no absurd global calamities, no over-dramatic nonsense. Just real people facing difficult human emotions and choices and helping each other through them. I can see why these fine actors decided to work in this film. Each of the actors delivers powerful performances: Ellen Burtsyn has never been better. My heart ached as she dithered about what to do with her life, both past, present, and future. Colin Firth was perfect in presenting the face of the future: shining with promise, but making us wonder nonetheless. Can we trust him? Until we realize the real question is: can we trust ourselves? Orlando Bloom shows us why it is so hard for those who believe in themselves and believe in the future to soldier on, despite so many disbelievers around, especially among loved-ones.

I could go, but the cast was magnificent and did the screenplay such justice. Horton Foote, despite his age, was at the height of his story-telling prowess. If you like real people; if you like movies that are real about humanity, then you will like "Main Street."

Going by the disparate cast members (Colin Firth to Tom Wopat) this movie sounded promising. I was wrong.

No spoilers, but Colin Firth trying to speak with an unidentifiable southern accent was both cringeworthy and laughable. What in the world was he thinking?

I have never understood why foreign actors try to affect American accents, especially when there are so many differnt regional dialects from which to choose. It would be like an American actor trying to speak like someone from the Holme Valley in Yorkshire England when they are supposed to live in the east end of London. Unless you are familiar with regional dialects of both areas, you can tell the difference. This results in a big fail. It would fall flat on the ears of those viewers who know the difference. Just speak in your native language.

The plot of this movie could have been expanded in so many different and successful ways, but it was dull and I was bored spitless.

I watched it because I am a big fan of Colin Firth. This is the only move I can remember with him as a cast member, in which I was truly disappointed. Sorry I can't give it more than one star.

This film wanders vapidly from one scene to another without any connective tissue. Why these actors would attach their talents to such an obvious bomb waiting to happen is beyond me. Don't be fooled by the trailer as it leads you to believe there's a heartwarming slice of life film waiting to be seen. Don't waste your time. Just when you are lead to believe that something is about to happen it evaporates into thin air. I truly have no idea who gave a green light to this script unless they needed a write off for the year. The two star rating I gave this film is out of pity for Ellen Burstyn who must have needed the money.