MY MOVIE SHELF: Pleasantville

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 170  Days to go: 166

Movie #213:  Pleasantville

Disguised behind a terribly goofy fantasy premise — twins David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are fighting over the television remote when it flies into a wall and busts, at which point a magical TV repairman (Don Knotts) shows up at their door, discovers David’s deep abiding love and knowledge of a stock ’50s TV show called Pleasantville, and gives them a magical remote that transports the two into the lives of the main family’s brother and sister duo, Bud and Mary Sue Parker, where they must try to fit into this plain and literal black and white world — Pleasantville is a subversively brilliant study on the nature of progress, changes and growth in society.

David is unhappy with his life in the modern world. His parents are divorced, he’s not close with either of them, and he has very few friends or prospects at high school. Even his twin sister disdains his massive dorkiness. That bone-deep unhappiness is why he gravitates to the Pleasantville show, where everything is, naturally, pleasant. There are only happy families, happy kids, and happy neighbors. Mom Betty (Joan Allen) is home all day cooking and smiling beatifically at her adoring children, while dad George (William H. Macy) comes home every day at six with a hearty “Honey, I’m home!” Bud has a job at Bill Johnson’s (Jeff Daniels) soda shop, and Mary Sue is a star student who goes steady with Skip (The Fast and the Furious’s Paul Walker). It’s an idealized life in an idealized world, and David wishes it was his.

It’s like a miracle, then, when he finds Jennifer and himself transported into the television show. He’s in awe of how great it is, and he wants to savor it. Jennifer is unimpressed, however, and David must try to preserve it in spite of her flippant attitude. What he learns, however, is that Jennifer is right to educate the townspeople. She’s right to expand their horizons. And he learns that he can’t stop her because it comes from who she is — just as it comes from who he is. They can’t help broadening the world of Pleasantville, because they already know a world beyond it.

The winds of time and change are always blowing, always moving. Just as in real life, change starts with kids curious about the world — what’s out there for them, what all can they experience — and manifests in experiments with sex and clothes and music and even reading (the books start out blank, but fill themselves in when David and Jennifer talk about what they remember of the plots). Discussion and conversation about other lives, other worlds, other possibilities becomes their drug, and it fuels them. They do what kids have always done, but because it’s in this comically limited world of a 1950s TV series the changes are more stark, more dramatic, and more noticeable. Women, often marginalized in such a world where they have no creative or personal outlet of their own, are the next to seek greater understanding, and this is manifested in the world of Betty herself. Artistic types like Bill, who looks forward all year to the one time he gets to paint his shop windows at Christmas, also reach out for more. And as the changes continue, resistance builds.

Unsurprisingly, the members of the establishment are the ones most threatened by these changes. The mayor, Big Bob (J.T. Walsh), pontificates about how things used to be pleasant and now they aren’t, when what he really means is that things are no longer pleasant and easy for him. In a particular stroke of brilliance, people who have “changed” from the traditional black and white palette into full technicolor are referred to as “colored people,” with some stores posting signs saying “No Coloreds,” and suddenly the film takes on the very real tinge of the Civil Rights movements of the actual time period this fictional world was masquerading as. And this is when David-Bud realizes how crucial it is to encourage these changes, to seek them out and to embrace them.

Margaret (Marley Shelton) is a girl from school who, in the original series, is “supposed” to go out with another boy, but once David and Jennifer show up, she finds herself drawn to Bud and his knowledge of the greater world. She’s fascinated by what it’s like and it’s her influence (along with Betty’s) that helps David-Bud see that while his world might be “louder and messier and more dangerous,” it’s also infinitely better and richer and more alive. And despite the denials of those railing against the colorization of Pleasantville (which is seriously some of the most beautiful special effects shots ever such a large part of a film), David-Bud knows it’s in all of them, and it’s inevitable that it will emerge. Whether it’s longing or rage or passion or curiosity or lust or self-reliance, “you can’t stop what’s inside you.”

Even the ending, in which Betty is seen with both George and then Bill, is left intentionally uncertain and questioning because life is uncertain, and life is full of questions. It’s a brilliant and impassioned defense of accepting and embracing change and growth. It’s a resounding declaration that nostalgia about “the good old days” are memories of a life that never existed, of a fantasy built in the minds of those afraid of anything new or different. It’s a celebration of our world and our life, because for all its faults and messiness is the true beauty and purpose of life itself. It’s what’s inside us, and what drives us, and what makes us great.

Beyond that, life, Pleasantville tells us, is “not supposed to be anything.” It just is.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Jurassic Park III

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 215  Days to go: 218

Movie #162:  Jurassic Park III

So I said in the last post that Jurassic Park III wouldn’t make quite as much of a blunder as The Lost World does in world-building and taking its sweet time to get to the island. This is true, but just barely. There are still several opening scenes in which the audience is apprised of the status of Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) in the intervening years and the pitch by the Kirbys (William H. Macy and Tea Leoni) to entice Grant and his assistant Billy (Alessandro Nivola) into joining them on an aerial tour of Isla Sorna. It’s really only the opening scene — so much stronger than The Lost World‘s — wherein the film’s inciting incident occurs in the skies around Isla Sorna, that builds enough tension to carry the viewer through the next few establishing scenes without them dragging.

This time, the filmmakers decide to hell with the experts, let’s populate this team of island visitors with a bunch of imbeciles. True, Dr. Grant (despite his cocksure stance to the contrary — arrogance is always punished, sir) accompanies the Kirbys and team onto the island, along with tag-along Billy, but nobody really wants to listen to him — even less so than they did in the first movie. These fools just want to come onto the island and stomp around screaming for young Eric Kirby (Trevor Morgan, offspring of the aforementioned Kirbys) and his stepfather Ben, who were the two parasailers in the opening scene.

Proving absolutely everything is commercialized, a tourist company in Costa Rica called Dino-Soar (classic), takes parasailers around the island for a unique view of whatever might be lurking there (still nobody has bombed these islands??). Their view of their boat obscured by fog, they feel some violent tugs and then notice as the fog clears that the boat crew is missing and the boat itself has sustained damage. Frantic, they disconnect their cable from the boat and float off into the air above a dinosaur-populated island and the big blue ocean, so these two aren’t that smart either. I mean, really, wouldn’t it be better to let the boat beach itself, fall into the sea still attached to said boat, and then, I don’t know, radio for help? Instead of just letting the wind whisk you off into wherever? Anyway, they don’t follow my advice and of course have gone missing, which is where the desperately seeking Kirbys come into the picture.

The Kirbys trick Dr. Grant into being their guide with an enormously kited check and big talk of being an international captain of the import/export industry. Then they land on the stupid island (the island, by the way, that Dr. Grant has never been to, but instead was the subject of Dr. Malcolm’s nightmare in The Lost World: Jurassic Park), and start screaming for their son and immediately get one of their crew killed. (The other two members don’t last much longer.)

Eventually they find the parasail, still attached to dear old stepdad, now eight weeks deceased. The boy is nowhere in sight, but luckily Dr. Grant stumbles upon him while trying to evade some nasty raptors. In fact, it’s Eric who saves the Dr. from said raptors, by using an old Injen gas bomb. Then it becomes a task to get back with the Kirbys and Billy and get off the island in one piece.

The raptors really take center stage here, as part of the exposition of the early scenes is to explain how they can vocalize and communicate with one another, for assistance or to send a warning or whatever. They are on the hunt for these human interlopers because genius Billy swiped a few of their eggs — he figures they’ll be worth a fortune, because who could foresee any problem with hatching live dinosaurs back in the States? (Billy unfortunately skipped The Lost World.) The raptors come across smarter and scarier than ever, even going so far as to set a trap using one of the aforementioned ill-fated team members as bait.

As always, though, the raptors aren’t the only threat. There’s a simply fabulous sequence in a birdcage with some nasty Pterodactyls (another reason I maybe wouldn’t have tried parasailing around a dinosaur island, DUH) in which young Eric is snatched away to be bird food in a dino-nest and valiant Billy risks himself to parasail in there and save him.

There’s also the newer, bigger, scarier dinosaur (with a back fin )known as the Spinosaurus, which apparently wasn’t on Injen’s initial species list. Uh-oh, looks like Injen wasn’t upfront about their business, if you can believe that. The Spinosaurus is a brutal killer, unfooled by standing still, and apparently super attracted to T-Rex urine. It’s also assumed to be the water-bound attacker of the boat, both at the beginning and end of the film (by virtue of the fin, I guess) but in my opinion the film doesn’t do enough to establish its land and sea dominance. I mean, on land it doesn’t look like much of a swimmer. Thank God, Paul Kirby (Macy) is, then, I guess. (Never introduce swimming lessons in the first act without deploying them in the third.) What the film does establish is that the Kirbys’ satellite phone is some kind of heavy duty miracle of engineering, tough enough to withstand the digestive system of a Spinosaurus — my cell quits working if I type too fast — and that a Spinosaurus, while seriously into T-Rex pee, has no interest in anything that smells like its own droppings.

So, Jurassic Park III is maybe a little too easy to make fun of at this point. I still enjoy it quite a bit. It’s still thrilling, it’s still awe-inspiring, it’s still a warning about the hubris of man, and it still offers Jurassic Park‘s Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) to save the day by deploying her state department husband to the island with a gazillion land and sea tanks when her little boy indicates the Dinosaur Man (illustrious Dr. Grant) is on the phone with a big growling monster in the background. (Okay, she infers most of that. The boy is 3; I’m sure all Ellie does is infer what he’s talking about.) It’s far-fetched, sure, but it’s still a fantastically thrilling popcorn adventure, and I’ll rarely complain about those.