Pleasantville Movie Review

I reviewed Pleasantville in 1998 for The Connecticut College Voice, but upon revisiting the film recently, decided that a new review was in order.

It’s so nice to return to a sixteen year old movie that you thought at that time was very good and find that it remains just as interesting and just as powerful now as it was then. I put Pleasantville in my top ten for 1998 and am happy to discover that it will remain there. I think the salience of the messaging of Pleasantville has only increased with time. Sure, the TV landscape has changed considerably since then. The Prime Time schedule hardly dominates anymore. Every basic cable station and even streaming providers have gotten into original content production. But TV’s roots still stretch back to the 1950s and a schedule full of wholesome plots directing family values toward the American public.

The Hunger Games Movie Review

I like futuristic dystopia stories for what they suggest about humanity at present and where we are ultimately headed if we continue down certain paths. But I generally like the vision to make some sense. I don’t necessarily demand a lot of back story and exposition to explain how the future became such as it is, but I would like it to make some sense according to what I know of the world today. Even when our real life timeline inevitably reaches the fictional year of some such movie or story and it turns out the vision hasn’t really panned out, in the best ones we can find some parallels and maybe say, “Well, it’s not 100 percent accurate but I can still see it as a possibility.” The year 2001 came and went and although we have yet to develop the capabilities to forge deep space travel as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we have been to the moon since the film’s 1968 release and humanity has explored (via unmanned probes) the far reaches of our solar system. Blade Runner presents a vision of Los Angeles in 2019 that is not close to coming to fruition, but still looks like a possibility in some more distant future.

Pleasantville Movie Review: Splashing the World with Color

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 30 October 1998.

Republished here with some minor editorial adjustments that do not affect content.

Gary Ross’s directorial debut, Pleasantville is a masterpiece of enormous relevance.  Like Big and Dave (both written by Ross), Pleasantville presents a fantasy world from which we have a lot to learn.

Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon play David and Jennifer, twins who each cope with their broken home in different ways. She is an adolescent rebel while he escapes to the fantastical world of “Pleasantville,” a 50’s sitcom in the style of “Father Knows Best,” as his parents argue over the phone. One night, a creepy TV repairman (Don Knotts) shows up at the door and offers them a special remote with a little more “oomph.” With the push of a button, David and Jennifer are pulled into the black and white world of “Pleasantville” where they fill in for Bud and Mary Sue, the children of Betty (Joan Allen) and George Parker (William H. Macy).