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.

Wag the Dog Movie Review

In 1997 there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter. There were message boards, email, websites, maybe some very early blogs, but the dissemination of information and access to reports, accounts, and testimonials, for all that we thought at the time was lightning fast, was nothing compared to today. This thought occurred to me while revisiting Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s seventeen-year old film about an invented war fed to the media to distract the public from a Presidential sex scandal two weeks before he hopes to be reelected. In it, Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean, a kind of independently contracted fixer brought into the White House by Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) to help clean up the mess and potential fallout once the story breaks. So Conrad enlists the help of Stanly Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a big Hollywood producer, to put the pieces in place to sell not just a war, but a whole package and all the emotions and patriotic fervor that come with it, to the public.

Special 500th Movie Review: Magnolia - a Modern Classic From My Collection

In choosing a movie to watch to mark my 500^th full length review, I went with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia because, along with Pulp Fiction and The Godfather, it’s one of my top three movies of all time. By that I mean I consider it not only a great film, but that I find it endlessly watchable. Incidentally, I chose it several weeks prior to, and started watching the night before, Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. It was merely a thematically fitting coincidence. I have tried to watch it about once a year since it came out in 1999 and have mostly kept up on that vow. I think I may have watched it twice during my five years in Spain and possibly only this time since returning two and a half years ago, but I am intimately familiar with the movie. I also chose it because so much time has passed since last we met.

From My Collection: Boogie Nights Movie Review

On big happy dysfunctional family.

From the explosively charged opening tracking shot that introduces most of the major characters to the quietly triumphant closing, Boogie Nights never lets up. It flogs you with an emotional paddle again and again. The ups are sometimes as extreme in their euphoria as the downs are dismal. For me, it is still the most exciting film Paul Thomas Anderson has made. It was only his second feature, but his dialogue is truly second to none and he squeezes in a remarkable amount of character development. He can economize better than any other writer-director working.

The Sessions Movie Review

One of the universalities of being human, one important thing that sets us clearly apart from the rest of the animals, is the pleasure, both physical and emotional, derived from sex. To make that physical connection with another person is a rite of passage we set for ourselves early on. It’s a mark that nearly every teenager desperately wants to reach. What if you were stricken with polio as a boy, your body left stiffened by a disease that wreaks havoc on your muscles? You’re not exactly paralyzed in the way most of us understand that condition because you have normal sensory perception throughout your body. You just can move anything. What if you reached middle age never having felt the exultation joining together sexually with another person? This is the beginning of the story in The Sessions, a true story about poet and journalist Mark O’Brien, who was also the subject of an Oscar-winning short documentary called Breathing Lessons in the late 90s. O’Brien documented his quest to lose his virginity in an article titled, “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate.”

From My Collection: State and Main Movie Review

Robert Altman’s brilliant 1992 return to form The Player gets all the ink when it comes to Hollywood satire. It is a fantastic piece of work – suspenseful and darkly comic. But re-watching State and Main, David Mamet’s comedy about a Hollywood production that tears apart a small New England town, I realized this has to be ranked as one of the great satirical films. What makes it more remarkable is that Mamet was primarily known for his thrillers, set up as complex confidence games. Although it was not nearly as much a departure as his 1999 film The Winslow Boy, a G-rated period piece family drama about a boy accused of theft at his school. State and Main is as biting and funny as his great screenplay for Wag the Dog, a satire of the political process.

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).

Gus Van Sant's Psycho Movie Review: If It Ain't Broken, Don't Fix It

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 11 December 1998.

Republished here unaltered.

As things generally go, you may want to avoid those rare films which aren’t screened for critics. They are usually extraordinarily bad and the filmmakers would rather have a chance at opening weekend box office and not kill those chances with bad reviews on opening day. But the case for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, a shot-for-shot re-creation of the original is not the same. Hitchcock did not screen his 1960 masterpiece for critics and Van Sant does the same as a way to take one more step toward his carbon copy.

I watched the original twice in the week preceding my viewing of the new version so that I could get a feel for the movement of the camera and take a handle on the dialogue. So little is changed in Van Sant’s that what is changed is hardly worth mentioning; even the license plate on Marion’s car is the same.