| Overall Grade: |
A |
|
| Story: |
A |
|
|
| Acting: |
B+ |
|
|
| Direction: |
A- |
|
|
| Visuals: |
A+ |
|
|
Change Is Beautiful...
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Feb 20, 2006
7
of
8 people found this review helpful
Finally, a film that reveals the true brilliance and beauty of change. If anyone has read the novel, "The Giver", you are going to love this!
Tobey Maguire is David, an eccentric teenager living in his own state of mind...and television. (Remind anyone of somebody) Reese Witherspoon, his sister, is the quintessential “non-thinking” teenage girl who remedies a date at her house to watch TV whereas the same time, David is anxious to sit and watch a marathon of the TV show he loves and has been watching for over a year. While his sister spices up for her sexy date, David is pouring soda and getting snacks to watch his beloved series marathon of an Andy Griffith style series in black and white of a very perfect and pleasant town. “Pleasantville”. Both hurry downstairs to the living room and grab the remote. After a brief argument, they break the remote, realizing that they cannot even turn-on the TV since it is "new". A TV repairman shows up at the door within a split-second and gives them a "new" remote that will "put them right in the show". And they hit the wrong button...
Now both are mystically stuck IN the show...stuck in black, grey, and white. Nothing but perfect day-to-day activity. Everyone is happy, nothing is wrong. However, the two siblings trapped in the show that are "real" and don't act like robots, inextricably start to bring change to everyone and eventually start to change their whole world...with colors...
Tobey Maguire is one of the great actors of my generation. Jeff Daniels is the artistic mind who can't help but think about something more. Reese Witherspoon even does a good job of acting, growing out of her immature status based image into a down-to-earth individual. The acting is a great result of a truly talented director. I have never heard of the writer/director, Gary Ross, but let us hope that he will give us even more films of great imagination, artistic traits, and visually amazing films. A very creative jive for all the cast and crew.
I can only jab at the amount of symbolism and metaphorical elements and moral points in this movie. Sometimes it really feels like we are in a black and white TV show, nothing changes and nothing REAL happens. But change comes whether we like it or not. There are those of us who embrace it and make it for the best of things and there are those who resist it and try so hard to keep the world safe from change. There are those who change and shine from it, then there are those who try to hide it. Over time, the characters in this film realize the potential of change and "feel" something inside them that cannot be described by words. Each time this happens, they gain color and stand out from the stained and dull grays blocking what's underneath. The basket ball teams captain comes back to tell the tail of him and Mary Sue at Lover's Lane. Afterward, the perfect winning team who never missed a shot, all missed nearly every one, suddenly realizing a taste of reality.
Evidence of this appears throughout world history. And just as Hitler seperated the Jews from the rest of the "pure race". The mayor separates the "pleasant" from the "unpleasant". He banned the use of any color in painting except for black, white, or gray. He banned certain music that made people dance. He banned the lustrous "Lover's Lane" where people made love and danced in the rain. He banned the library so people couldn't gain a certain "unpleasantness" and start to "ruin" the town further. Everyone didn't even know there was a place outside of Pleasantville. In the City Hall, the color people had to even sit on a balcony above the normal "pleasant" grays. This was the resistance of the very thing that makes us human. That place inside that no one can touch. A feeling beyond comprehension, a thought of something so valuable, yet so fragile. So fragile that anything above a whisper, it would vanish in the wind. The two main characters bring change to the only known world that the townsfolk live in and show them much much more. The beauty of feeling, the beauty of knowing, the beauty of reality, breaking free from an impossible oppression of color.
The visual effects in this film are simply marvelous and amazing. It's ideal cinematography is like that of "Schindler's List". It makes you look at the simplest object, a clock, has a neon yellow light glowing around it, surrounded by the on-going dullness. A brown comb is used to brush back a teenager's greased colorless hair. We see David drive a girl in an old Chevy convertible through the ongoing colorless, but broken by the pink leaves fluttering through the wind across the air and the road. A woman's tear rolls down her cheek and reveals color underneath. But most mesmerizing of all, in a soda shop we see the neverending dullness, and then an eye's feast of bright colors explode in paintings that the shop owner painted all over the glass and walls. Just about this entire film is candy for your eyes, without any action. Truely some of the most brilliant visuals I have seen in a film and so delicately fascinating.
This is a motion picture with a story so simplistic and yet so deep and complex. It tells us the value of colors and change. That change comes and goes as it pleases and we cannot choose when we change, but we can choose what we can do with our change. We can make it for the better or for the worse. It is the inevitable part of life that brings us closest to reality from our minds. We all strive for perfection and the journey of we all must take (that so many forget) is for the good of us all. Tobey Maguire stars in films that prove to us that the human journey is not easy and it sometimes requires most of us and it is never a road going in a complete circle, it is a road in the night that keeps on going... who knows where that might takes us!
Pleasantville is one of the most beautiful and artistic films I have watched. It is one of those movies that says something different to each of us, like looking at an abstract painting. It teaches us that there is a difference between a movie and a film. Whereas movies are purely for entertainment and films are an ART. An art where everyone can look at make them think, where someone can sit down and stare at a silver screen for 2 hours and be hopelessly drawn in and grow with the characters inside and have no choice but to feel for them. And at the end, you feel concluded and resolved. You feel a relief from the building tension and a feeling of resolution. A feeling that everything is going to be...alright. This is the essence of a great film... and it earns the right of an "A"...
And as I said...if you loved the novel "The Giver"...your gonna love this!!
My Rating: A - Outstanding and Imaginative!!
-Jerry Johnston |
My Public Profile 
