Word: color
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...real but discovers to be a colossal fake, a TV world made up of potential Trumans who need an outsider to help transform the fake into reality. What distinguishes Pleasantville, however, is the device used to show the transformation: the slow-ripple change from black-and-white film to color. It's one of the most ingenious visual devices ever conceived for a mainstream movie, and certainly makes for one of the most inviting preview trailers in a long while...
...Jennifer long to rebel. Appalled by the sanitized blankness of Pleasantville life, she undertakes to teach the townspeople a thing or two, beginning with sex and progressing to the larger issue of what lies outside the Pleasantville universe. As the semi-robotic citizens gradually come to life, splashes of color begin to permeate the black-and-white world--not all at once or to everyone, but by steps and degrees, delightful in their unpredictability. The process is best represented in the paintings of Jeff Daniels' inarticulate soda-shoppe proprietor, whose self-expression increases in richness and assurance as his palate...
...another allegorical message: what Pleasantville appears to be on the surface is what it actually is--a mere surface, a facade, nothing of substance. Applied to the time period it parodies, it makes fundamentally the same observation that last year's L.A. Confidential did: the golden ideal of the color in Pleasantville becomes a pointed metaphor for color in the racial sense, tying in neatly with the movie's larger lesson that change is inevitable and desirable, if not an unmixed blessing...
While Poppea's libretto certainly sounds better than it reads as a plot, this production's singing was so fluent that I could follow the plot almost continuously. Also, I never really noticed that the actors were singing. The color and expression of various voices were at the forefront of the production, but none of the singing seemed staged. The four leads were particularly strong. Quilichi and D'Amelio occasionally swung a flat, everyday-speech exclamation into their performances, and Buff, in her transsexual role as Otto, single-handedly built the tension of the play, bellowing out against Poppea...
...said. She joked that "maybe we should plan to both wear green the following day." The next day, they bumped into each other again. In his green attire, Brian eagerly hinted to Jeanne at their emerging inside joke. Jeanne thought it was totally weird for this guy to be color-coordinating his outfit around her. Jeanne said, "Brian, I didn't want you to think I was so literal." But Brian explained, "Well, I didn't want you to think I was a joke...