Word: trumaning
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Pleasantville charms; on the visual level, it dazzles. Half comedy, half fable, it flips the premise of The Truman Show, presenting, instead of a man trapped in a TV world he thinks is 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...
...film describes how American officials were sent to investigate the displaced person camps, and were horrified by the conditions they saw. President Truman urged the British, who then controlled Palestine, to allow more Jews to immigrate...
...movie Pleasantville marks the second time this year that Hollywood has turned its cameras on itself, with interesting and imaginative results. The first, of course, was The Truman Show, which took television to task for diverting our attention from the real world, accusing the medium of (literally) caging the human spirit in a dome of artifice. TV figures prominently in the complex morality of Pleasantville as well, but the movie is anything but just another case of the media being cynical about the effects of the media (which, by the way, we've had quite enough of). Pleasantville...
...mentioned in the final communique, but Zhu's once ambitious plans are still the subject of a fierce backroom debate. Everyone knows where the buck stops in China's economy--not least Zhu, who, before he became Premier in March, coined his own version of the motto Harry Truman used: "I have 100 coffins--99 for corrupt bureaucrats and one for myself...
...movie of all time: a bit of 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...