Word: towns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vegas really buy some class and still attract the gaming classes? Or is this one crapshoot Sin City can't win? Las Vegas has no choice but to take the wager. It can no longer afford to be a casino-centric town, although the numbers seem to indicate otherwise. Last year some 30.5 million visitors spent $25 billion in Las Vegas and Clark County, including $6.2 billion on gambling, which was up from $5.7 billion two years before. But the gaming take along the Strip has gone from 58% of total revenues 10 years ago to 53% today. That...
...hidden agenda of Pleasantville, an epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening from writer-director Gary Ross. The movie imagines that two teenagers, David (Tobey Maguire) and his randy sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), are magically transported from the '90s into the small, sleepy town of David's favorite '50s sitcom. The "knows-best" father, George (William H. Macy), and his wife Betty (Joan Allen), all starched sweetness, are convinced that David is Bud, a.k.a. Sport, and that Jennifer, now outfitted in a poodle-skirt-and-sweater set, is Mary Sue--Muffin to her doting dad. Weirdest...
...Back to the Future (teen time travel), a whit of The Wizard of Oz (the color of dreams), a plot from The Purple Rose of Cairo (with actor Jeff Daniels linking two stories of real and reel life), a lot from The Truman Show (except that here everyone in town believes in the grand fiction of a perfectly ordered society). But Ross, who helped create two other fantasies of displacement, Big and Dave, has more in mind: Follow your heart, not the rules. And '50s bad, '60s good...
...these emotions (by gazing at a Picasso or hearing Buddy Holly or spending the evening with a naughty girl from the '90s), the people of Pleasantville literally blush into color. They wear their passion on their shamed, fervent faces, on their clothes, like a scarlet letter. And the town burghers, still cocooned in monochrome propriety, are perplexed, vexed, vengeful...
...that it is less a '60s movie than a '50s one; it has the didacticism and sentimentality of the serious Hollywood product of that earlier time. That one and this. Stretching credulity but never hedging a bet, Ross wants universal acceptance for his film, so he finally makes the town so endearing that one of the '90s kids decides to stay there. (Gee, wait till Mom finds out!) He hopes you will too. That's the difference between today's best Hollywood filmmakers and the top independent auteurs. Todd Solondz and Hal Hartley don't care if you like...