I love Sam Shepard's writing no matter what the topic. He is one of the finest writers in American History, because he was so brutally honest with his depictions of real people. Sometimes, writers will avoid the hardest part of the story to tell, so they rewrite facts that soften the emotional blow to their own psycne's. Not Sam Shepard, Sam changed the reality of story telling with his 'Life-To-Page,' inflections that make most people cringe with digust. But, we've discovered as an audience, that the truth always rises to the top. Sam has just fastened the pace of revealing the truth without having to investigate the story. You were and are still the greatest ins[piration to us in the industry, Sam! Thank you for your brutal haunting honesty, with your expose styled writing.P.S. LOVED all the supporting characters as well. They were real people as well, that Sam kept stowed deep in his memory.

I'm blown away by this piece. I read the play, saw the play...and this movie is spectacular! I'm usually not a big "Downer-Movie," supporter...I like happy endings, but, with that being said...I felt that the story, the actors, the setting, the cinematography, everything about the movie was amazing.I grew-up in central Texas and this movie depicted a lot of what I saw in the state.And it looks like Barak Hussein Obama's driving us right back into the ground again.I give this movie a 10 out of 10. The acting was the best I've seen in years.

This would've been a *great* silent film. The acting really is good, at least in a Look Ma, I'm Doing Really Big Acting! sort of way.Everything is HUGE. Every line is PROFOUND! Every scene is SHATTERED BY HUMAN TRAGEDY!Mostly, I felt like gagging. Yet, like any train wreck, I couldn't tear my eyes away. This dialogue might've worked on the stage, although I doubt it. On the screen, it was cluttered, haphazard, hackneyed and pretty much every other stereotypical negative adjective you can come up with to describe a really bad dramatic work.If you enjoy your melodrama in huge, heaping doses, you *might* enjoy the movie. Be prepared to wait, however. For all that melodrama, this thing sure plods along at its own pace.This script must've sounded a lot different when the actors involved were reading it to themselves. It simply doesn't work once they get around to delivering it in front of the camera.IMDB does us a great disservice, at times, when it uses its goofy computer-controlled "weighted score". Curse of the Starving Class deserves less than a 1.Character-driven fiction is great, but when you develop your characters by simply pushing them through hoops with no plausible explanation for their maturation or evolution, it isn't character development! Your characters must have a motivation. Being drunk for a while and waking up in a field is *not* character development. That's a plot contrivance.Stay away from this movie. Or at the very least, watch it muted. Perhaps you'll get some amusement from all the arm-waving the characters do.Oh, and word to the wise -- to prove that this is truly an artsy film, you see James Woods in all his dangly male "look-at-me, I'm-the-figurative-and-literal-representation-of-the-naked-vulnerability-of- man" glory.Don't say you weren't warned.

This movie just sort of drags on, and never does really turn around or make a true point. I felt bad for James Woods, Kathy Bates, and Henry Thomas, because they are such great actors, and they chose to do a piece a crap of a movie like this. I give this movie a 5 out of 10, only because the actors tried.