While I am not a huge David Mamet fan I enjoyed most of his movies and think he's a good director. Since he's so famous his daughter Clara decided to direct and star in a movie... with disastrous results. And considering that there are only 5 reviews with three that give it 1s and one that gives it a 10 it seems like a polarizing movie.
Maude (Mamet) is a 18 year old girl that seems to live a perfect life until she is suspended from school for expressing her creative vein, loses one of her best friends when she has to move for job reasons and has a relationship with another boy but after a while he leaves her because he lost interest. So she finds some happiness in writing her novel but after a while she'll have the writers' block and things go awry. That's it folks.
To say that TWO BIT WALTZ is terrible is an understatement. Our lead was seen not only as a desperate loser, but also like a stupid that can't manage to have nothing going right in her life. The acting was lazy by all, including by talented William Macy as the careless dad that doesn't even care if he sleeps on the couch or on the toilet seat, or even if there is food in the kitchen. As for the other characters, they acted more like bad caricatures than normal people. And there were some dream sequences where Gloria imagines to be in a grass field and some people with the heads of elephants, rabbits and small birds and other people dressed in horse, lion and bear costumes that stand alone or dance in the grass... it just made me feel stupider. Oh and let me talk about few of the nasty moments:
1) The family goes to visit the grandmother on her death bed and as they come, she dies instantly. That's funny for some uh?
2) When Maude is suspended from school nobody except the mother seemed to care in the least, like if it's ok to have such a marvellous daughter (pun intended)
3) When the family goes to a psychiatrist (David Paymer) he scolds the family after some minutes and when she meets Maude out of the building he tells her ''Do me a w**k''. I can't say the full word because of IMDB standards, but it seriously makes you wonder about the depiction of psychiatry in movies and TV shows, and I assume that in real life he would have been fired ASAP!
Overall, a terrible movie caused not by nepotism but thanks to a terrible script that must have cost 5 cents, sleep-walking acting, the aforementioned nasty moments and some fantasy sequences so jarring that defy description. Easy to skip unless you love to see talented actors in embarassing performances.
