Pleasantville or is it?

Pleasantville or is it?

Ipinaskil ni Unknown sa 8:27 AM ✪ No comment yet

Pleasantville

Would you want to live in a world where woman are responsible only in doing household chores and caring for the kids, books with blank pages, firefighters who only knows how to save cats from trees, and where men goes to work and comes home with their dinner ready on the table? Well, that is the life everybody thought to be perfect in the black and white 1958 sitcom, Pleasantville.

David Wagner is a high school nerd who has an almost obsessive interest in the sitcom. He even has every line memorized from every episode. His twin sister (from the mother side), Jennifer, on the other, thinks the whole idea is stupid. She's more interested in boys and MTV. One night when the two was left at home and two fought over the remote and broke it. Coincidentally, a mysterious TV repairman shows up at their door with a super magic remote control. When the TV repairmen left the two continue on fighting when one of them accidentally clicked on the remote and they magically transported from the 90's to the mellow world of Pleasantville, where they need to act as Bud, and Mary Sue at least until they find the repairman again.

Jennifer want out of Pleasantville right away, because according to her she doesn’t want to be stock in the “Nerd Ville”, where everything is black and white, and when kids weren’t supposed to watch TV early in the morning. Unexpectedly the Captain of the basketball team catches Jennifer’s eyes and that made Jennifer decide to stay in Pleasantville for a while.  Now, acting as Bud and Mary Sue, they need to follow the script in order not to cause any problems, but being Jennifer, as we all know it, She is bound to do something expected of her. So she didn’t follow the script and took the captain of the Basketball team to the lovers lane and they had sex. That instantly made sex a trend in Pleasantville and so did other things.

When citizens of Pleasantville started to discover new things and try them out, color starts to come naturally to their world. Some of them love it and some of them hate it, there are even people who are scared that they are not black and white anymore… You know why? It’s because of the people who hates the changes that are appearing. They don’t appreciate what life has given them; they don’t want to try new things. Quote this “Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently certain things have become unpleasant. Now, it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant.” Really, who calls art / beauty unpleasant? It appears like modern thoughts are so strong that they are too overwhelming for them to accept. But after about half of the people turn into full color, Pleasantville raised ground. Some residents don't like or understand what is happening. They hold on to their normal ways, and they don't experience the colorful changes their friends and families had.

 

On the contrary, I like how the owner of the soda shop, Bill Johnson, really loves art, when Bud gave him a book with lots of paintings he said,” Where am I going to see colors like that? Must be awfully lucky to see colors like that. I bet they don't even know how lucky they are.” When he said that I started thinking, He’s right, we don’t know how lucky we are to have such amazing colors that we can work with,how we can appreciate art and make beautiful art works and be proud of our own works. In the end of the movie though, I was glad that everything went wonderfully. The old mellow Pleasantville became a colorful and festive like our modern world, Now.

Although I enjoyed this film, I was really disappointed that this elaborated story had so little meaning. The only two lesson I got is that change, although exciting to some and feared by others is possible, and that beauty that is given to us should be appreciated and not hated.

There are parts of the movie where I got quite confuse cause when an angry group trashed the soda shop none of them changed color, but when Big Bob exploded and showed his anger he changed from black and white to colored. From what I understood the change of color should only take place when what they did is for the good.

I would like to say though; In conclusion, Pleasantville is really a wonderful film that’s filled with beauty. It is very easy to understand although it shows to have deep meanings in it. It is very appropriate to compare it to our world today. For all the right reasons I would gladly recommend this movie to everyone, especially to the kids and teens today.