Pleasantville (DVD)

This film is all about David (Tobey Maguire) and his sister Jennifer (Reece Witherspoon). They are from a broken home and are two totally different characters. David is an intelligent, unassuming and totally addicted to an old 50’s television show, Pleasantville. Jennifer, on the other hand, is the wild child of the family. She is part of the popular community at school and is also completely man mad. You could ask David absolutely anything about Pleasantville and he would certainly give you the right answer, he may even correct you in some places. So it is no surprise that, on the day this film begins, he is about to sit down and watch a 24-hour ...  Read the complete review

Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon star here as teenage siblings David and Jennifer in 90s America. She is cool, he really isn't. On an evening when Witherspoon finally gets a date with her dream guy there is also a marathon showing of Pleasantville, a black and white soap/sit-com about an idyllic small town somewhere in the American Midwest. In this place the weather is always perfect, nothing untoward happens and the basketball team always win. During a fight over who will watch what that evening the TV remote is broken, but fortunately there is a TV repair man just passing by who assists them by providing a new remote. Suspicious? Of course not! This new ...  Read the complete review

I had watched this film quite a few years ago but couldn't really remember much about it so when I settled down to watch it today it was like watching it from new and also quite surprising. I had a vague recollection of a quiet gentle film where not much happened but although this might appear to be so on the surface, this is not what this film is like at all. In the film the central characters are David and Jennifer (played by Tobey McGuire and Rees Witherspoon. They are a couple of normal teenagers, brother and sister who unexpectedly get transported back into a rather bland 1950s television programme - Pleasantville. Although initially shocked they soon ...  Read the complete review

Pleasantville U.S.A, the typical image of 1950's Middle America, where polite inhabitants wander around the perfectly kept streets busying themselves with everyday chores never wondering about the big world outside of their small village, never experiencing emotion or seeing true colour. 1990's Middle America, an urban jungle ruled by MTV and huge fast food chains. It population: Sex crazed teenagers all looking for a good time, the next great fashion trend or their next super attractive conquest. These two harshly different realities are about to collide in spectacular fashion when Jennifer and David Wagner, two thoroughly modern teenagers, get sucked into a 1950's ...  Read the complete review

Like the characters in a reverse Wizard of Oz, American teens David and Jenifer find themselves teleported from their complicated colourful, modern existence into a safe, regulated, monochrome one. That's the beguiling premise of Pleasantville, the assured directorial debut from noted screenwriter Gary Ross. Don't ask how they get there - it makes about as little sense as the time-travelling stunts in Back to the Future and Peggy gets Mariied - but one minute the quarelsome siblings are watching big bro's favourite kitsch 50's sitcom Pleasantville, the next they've actually become "Bud" and "Mary Sue", the wholesome offspring ...  Read the complete review