It’s Friday night (almost Saturday morning) and I’ve just been hanging around at home tonight, watching television and tidying the house. TV was great tonight: I watched “Pleasantville”. I remember vividly Sue mentioned the movie a few years ago saying how fantastic it was, and I thought “how bizarre”. I’ve seen the movie several times now and I love it.
In case you’re unaware of the plot, here’s a blurb I found on the internet.
David Wagner (Tobey Maguire) is a Nineties kid with a Fifties addiction. He’s hooked on reruns of a classic television show called “Pleasantville,” set in a simple place where everyone is swell and perky, “confrontation” is a dirty word and life is pleasingly pleasant.
Addicted to this utopian world, David immerses himself in “Pleasantville” as an innocent escape from the trouble-plagued real world that he must share with his ultra-hip, totally popular twin sister, Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon). But one evening, life takes a bizarre twist when a peculiar repairman (Don Knotts) gives him a strange remote control, which zaps David and his sister straight into Pleasantville.
Trapped in a radically different dimension of sight and sound, David and Jennifer find themselves cast as members of the TV family, the Parkers. David has become “Bud” and Jennifer has been transformed into “Mary Sue,” and they are surrounded by the black and white suburbia that once kept David glued to the tube for hours.
It doesn’t take long to discover that there’s no news, weather or sports when you’re living in a black and white paradise where everything is always…pleasant. Books have no words, the high school basketball team always wins, and nobody ever questions why things are always so perfect. Initially, David revels in the prozac-like haze that has gripped Pleasantville. But when Jennifer brings her Nineties-like attitude into this unsuspecting era of blandness, things start to happen in living color.
All the repressed desires of life in the Fifties begin to boil up through the people of Pleasantville, changing their lives in strange and wonderful ways that none of them had even dared to dream of, until they were visited by two kids from the real world.
I also videotaped the movie “Under The Sun”, a Swedish movie which features Linda Ulvaeus, the daughter of Bjorn and Agnetha from ABBA. I’ll watch it tomorrow.
Also went out for drinks with ABBAMAILERS on Wednesday night.
Aside from that… nothing else to report. Sorry, it’s been a boring week… but that’s life in Pleasantville, isn’t it?
Leave a Reply