Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

homespun13 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.

John Raymond Peterson The talent in this movie would make any director jump for joy; it's unfortunately used to deliver a weak character study, and not a character study of people so much as a character study of a town with the 'Main Street' a symbol of slow death. There is a user review by 'tarmcgator' from Durham, that elaborately sets the record straight about Durham N.C. and I was happy to read it. The actors Colin Firth, Ellen Burstyn, Patricia Clarkson and Orlando Bloom, all talented and experienced, were likely just filling in time between projects because I don't understand why they would have signed on to this project. They can't be faulted for doing a good job in a movie so tedious and slow; supporting actors Andrew McCarthy, Margo Martindale and Amber Tamblyn can no more be blamed for the anemic film. There is nothing compelling, nothing in way of build up, no climax; a couple of days in the life of a city that has seen its best days decades ago and where the story of three typical small families (what's left of them) is told with no emotional investment for the audience. It has a low rating and few will recommend it; I certainly don't.

tarmcgator I gather that Horton Foote chose Durham, N.C., as the setting for his MAIN STREET screenplay because of its symbolic value as a city that has undergone substantial changes in its economy in the past half-century, and he wanted to write about people trying to deal with change being imposed on them. I am not going to comment on the overall quality of the film here, except to say that, given the anemic screenplay, the reputable cast seems flat and largely listless, as if they realized once the shooting started just how bad the script was.No, what I want to address is the portrayal of my hometown, to which I chose to move and in which I have lived for the past twenty-five years. At the risk of sounding like Joe the Civic Booster, the city of Durham portrayed in MAIN STREET bears only faint, surface resemblance to the actual place. Anyone who manages to sit through this movie should NOT think they've learned much about the actual Durham. For one thing, Durham is not a small town but a city of more than 200,000 residents, part of a larger metropolitan area (Wake, Durham, and Orange counties) exceeding 2 million.Yes, downtown Durham is struggling. It was struggling before the Great Recession and it continues to struggle with reinvigorating itself as a vital city center. It needs more retail businesses, more reasons for the suburban middle-class to come downtown and enjoy the urban ambiance. In that respect, it's hardly alone among U.S. cities, small and large. Other parts of Durham – notably, the older working class neighborhoods within a mile or so of downtown – also are hurting.The downtown area is only part of the city. Moreover, downtown Durham has snapped back in the past few years. At least as far back as the early 1980s, old tobacco industry structures in the inner city were being rehabbed. Durham held its last tobacco market (where farmers would auction off their crop) in 1986, and the huge American Tobacco complex closed the following year. By 2001, the last cigarette plant in the city (Liggett Group) had gone. In the past decade, despite a slow start and the general downturn of the U.S. economy, many downtown buildings have been renovated and repurposed as residential, office, and retail spaces, or are in the process. The old tobacco warehouse district has become the Durham Central Park, and there is a growing bar and restaurant scene downtown.Downtown Durham also is the site of much new construction over the past two decades, including the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the Durham Performing Arts Center, the new urban transit center and a new Durham County legal complex. There's a big, modern Marriott hotel and convention center there, too, rather than the seedy little hotel in which Gus LeRoy stayed in the film. New, privately funded construction has complemented the new public structures, as well as refurbished buildings that originated in the early 20th century and before (such as the Carolina Theater, where MAIN STREET was shown here). As I said, downtown is only part of Durham. MAIN STREET makes no mention of Durham's two thriving universities. Duke, with its world-class medical center, is the city's largest employer. N.C. Central University is regarded as a leader among the nation's historically black state universities. (Harris Parker, the cop in MAIN STREET, could have been attending NCCU's School of Law, one of six university law schools in North Carolina and the only one where a student can earn a law degree at night while working his or her day job.) The film also makes no mention of Research Triangle Park, which since the 1960s has been providing jobs for thousands of residents of Durham and other nearby counties at such employers as GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco, Merck, BASF, Intel, and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, as well as at IBM's largest U.S. operation. The city has numerous suburban residential developments and shopping areas as well as several well-preserved old neighborhoods and commercial districts closer to downtown.Durham is well-integrated into the metropolitan area known as the Research Triangle. Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Cary, Carrboro, UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State University are indeed nice places for Durham residents to visit -- as well as places where many of them work --and relatively easy to get to. I missed MAIN STREET when it opened in Durham, but I caught it at a theater in Cary, an easy thirty-minute drive from my Durham home.Please – I know I sound like a Chamber of Commerce flack (which I am not), but Durham is NOT some isolated urban hellhole full of desperate, blue-collar types and faded aristocrats lamenting the passing of the city's tobacco heyday and wondering where their next job is coming from. Unfortunately, there are several other small cities and towns in North Carolina that resemble the Durham of MAIN STREET, places whose former textile and furniture mills have gone overseas and left downtowns devastated, hungry for industry and development. Durham is always after new companies and more jobs as well – especially in the current economy – but, again, it only vaguely resembles the city depicted in MAIN STREET. And, believe me, if Gus LeRoy came to town proposing to truck "hazardous waste" from Louisiana to Texas via Durham (?), the public outcry would be deafening.

JP-106 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."