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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: New Line Home Video
Salesrank: 5206
Released: June 1, 2004 |
| Our Price: $2.98 |
| Used Price: $1.98 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
When 90s teens David and Jennifer (Tobey Maguire, Spiderman, Reese Witherspoon, Legally Blonde) get zapped into the perfect suburbia of the black and white 50s sitcom, Pleasantville, what results is a visionary adventure.
Pleasantvilles perfect people include a mild-mannered soda jerk (Jeff Daniels, Dumb and Dumber), a socially repressed mom (Joan Allen, Face/Off) and a father who always knows best (William H. Macy, Fargo) But, when 90s pop culture clashes with 50s family values, chaos ensues, turning the town of Pleasantville upside down and black and white into color.
Description of Pleasantville (New Line Platinum Series):
Fantastical writer Gary Ross (Big, Dave) makes an auspicious directorial debut with this inspired and oddly touching comedy about two '90s kids (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) thrust into the black-and-white TV world of Pleasantville, a Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom complete with picket fences, corner malt shop, and warm chocolate chip cookies. When a somewhat unusual remote control (provided by repairman Don Knotts) transports them from the jaded real world to G-rated TV land, Maguire and Witherspoon are forced to play along as Bud and Mary Sue, the obedient children of George and Betty Parker (William H. Macy and Joan Allen). Maguire, an obsessive Pleasantville devotee, understands the need for not toppling the natural balance of things; Witherspoon, on the other hand, starts shaking the town up, most notably when she takes basketball stud Skip (Paul Walker) up to Lover's Lane for some modern-day fun and games. Soon enough, Pleasantville's teens are discovering sex along with--gasp!--rock & roll, free thinking, and soul-changing Technicolor. Filled with delightful and shrewd details about sitcom life (no toilets, no double beds, only two streets in the town), Pleasantville is a joy to watch, not only for its comedy but for the groundbreaking visual effects and astonishing production design as the town gradually transforms from crisp black and white to glorious color. Ross does tip his hand a bit about halfway through the film, obscuring the movie's basic message of the unpredictability of life with overloaded and obvious symbolism, as the black-and-white denizens of the town gang up on the "coloreds" and impose rules of conduct to keep their strait-laced town laced up. Still, the characterizations from the phenomenal cast--especially repressed housewife Allen and soda-shop owner Jeff Daniels, doing some of their best work ever--will keep you emotionally invested in the film's outcome, and waiting to see Pleasantville in all its final Technicolor glory. --Mark Englehart
Pleasantville (New Line Platinum Series) Reviews:
great for high school students 
2009-12-21 - I used this with high school students for a remedial English class, to a great response. Because the symbolism and the story features are so obvious, yet entertaining, it was easy for them to identify metaphors, allusions, themes, etc. These inner-city (mainly Latino and Chicano) non-readers were able to write fairly decent essays about the themes in the film and the use of symbols, etc. They also learned something about what the famous 1960's were a rebellion against -- just how oppressive that focus on conforming to societal norms can be -- and some gained insight into similar pressures in their own lives today. There is just enough sexual references to catch the attention of all, without any explicit sex to make it unacceptable in the classroom. (most have much more explicit sexual content on their ipods).
Truly Original
2009-09-27 - This movie was one of the few films made in recent decades with a truly original plot (another one was The Truman Show). I admit that I went to see it, expecting another leftist political propaganda movie from Hollywood, full of the usual cliches. You can argue either way that it is and it is not, but like Dead Man Walking, it does a superb balancing act. It starts out portraying the grim statistics of the present day and the contemporary characters are nothing if not contemptible (the mother is chasing after a single guy, leaving the kids alone; the sister is a cheap whore). The teenage boy takes refuge in overdosing on a 50s black and white TV show where you have a nuclear family and the horrors of contemporary life are absent, and then he is catapulted there. Once there, however, things are bland, too bland. Once he starts introducing books into the kids's lives and once the slut starts screwing around anything with pants, color begins to come into the picture. Unfortunately, things start to break down and some people suddenly start to act in a decidedly nasty way and the parents break up.
Definitely an original film. It is surprising that Hollywood produced it.
Pleasantville
2009-09-23 - I managed to accidentally buy 2 instead of 1 of this DVD, but other than that, one needs to understand what McCarthyism thinking did to this country and the dynamics of fear in a society during social change to get this one, but I love it. Video condition is excellent. New. Both of them. lol
Big Thumbs UP!
2009-09-13 - When I first began to watch this movie I thought it was going to be a real "oh let's go back to the good old days" moralizing yawner of a movie. I was exactly wrong. What a beautiful commentary on how the human spirit must express itself. In short, I love this movie.
"Where's My Blu-Ray?"
2009-08-04 - Seriously, was "Pleasantville" the best movie of the 1990's? I know I'm overlooking a lot of superlative work to say that but I just happened to watch it again last night and got clobbered all over by its wonderous ingenuity and charm. "Pleasantville" is a movie I NEVER get tired of and by golly, now that it's only $5.99 to buy it new you really have no excuse but to give it a shot.
I will forgo a synopsis here because so many other reviewers preceding me have already done so. Let me just observe that if you want to experience full-frontal allegory, you cannot do better than this. There is so much symbolism and social commentary gently packaged in this sweet parable of an Eisenhower era sitcom come to life! I must confess for this 51 year old reviewer the demographic and generational arrows launched by "Pleasantville" score a direct hit on my boomer-era heart. I would hope younger viewers unaware of the '50's TV conventions being employed as background here can still understand the social strictures and conventions referenced, and even if they can't, can still marvel at the incredible comic/dramatic performances AND the spectacular b&w/color photography that is SO important to the storytelling.
The cast--KILLER! Reese Witherspoon, Tobey McGuire, Jeff Daniels, Bill Macy (where's my dinner!), J.T. Walsh (alas! His last role--RIP)--all sublime REALLY in every respect. But I gotta RAVE at you about just how POWERFUL and INTENSE Joan Allen's performance as an archetypal sitcom mom awakening slowly, and painfully, to a fully 3-D technicolor life, turns out to be (the same journey the entire town takes, albeit grudgingly). I believe this was my first exposure to Joan and her tortured but determined journey depicted here still gives me shivers. I can't imagine any other actress giving such a finely calibrated and sympathetic portrayal. This performance--really ALL of "Pleasantville"--are prime examples of just how GOOD "comedy" acting can be. So much more than just slapstick here!
I can't overlook Don Knotts--who better to provide 1950's "cred" than Barney Fife himself? If you can find it, check out the criminally forgotten Knotts movie The Love God? for Don at his most comically surreal; Yeah, maximum "guilty pleasure" for your reviewer, but I love the outrageous '70's Dacron Polyester Mens' fashion parade and especially the hysterical courtroom faceoff; Don goes on trial as a porn merchant, and gets denounced in open court as a "capering libertine, a lecherous goat, partaking in depraved orgies"--Truly comedy from beyond space and time as we know it!
For those of us who remember the 1950's, "Pleasantville" is ESSENTIAL viewing that will pluck every emotional string you still have. No doubt there are stone hearts who can watch and not be moved, but I'm certainly not one of them. So many memorable & quotable lines of dialogue too: "I don't WANT it to go away!!!" "Those are Whitey's cookies!" "Where's My Dinner!" "You're safe for now, you're in a bowling alley!" "I'm wearing three pounds of underwear here!" "You can pin me anytime!" And I could go on--share your own favorites later.
Also highly recommended, and on a similar wavelength: Matinee [Import] starring John Goodman as an early '60's schlock horror movie producer flogging his new monster epic as the all-too-real terror of the Cuban Missle Crisis unfolds. Then, if you're ready to graduate to the "hard stuff", steel yourself for the almost psychedelic melodramatic swoons of the incredible director Douglas Sirk in All That Heaven Allows Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Douglas Sirk (NTSC All Region Import), or if you're really feeling daring, WRITTEN on the WIND (NTSC All Region Import) Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone, Douglas Sirk.
Let me close as I began: "Pleasantville" is a landmark modern masterpiece and let me declare here publicly, given its unprecedented and amazingly deft use of color in the plot (as you'll see) is especially deserving of the best picture (and sound--OUTSTANDING Randy Newman orchestral score) possible. So--I say again--WHERE'S MY BLU-RAY?!?
