2013 Summer Movies: #2 Pleasantville

Made in 1998 and starring a host of big name actors such as Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon along with several other familiar screen faces.  Don Knotts has a hilarious role throughout the movie and look for his reaction at the end of the film as he's driving away.

Pleasantville was filmed in color, then individually manipulated to replace color in certain sections of the film.  The effect is succinctly describe here: http://video.about.com/desktopvideo/Pleasantville-Effect-With-Final-Cut.htm

Rated PG-13 for language and thematic elements dealing with sexuality. (It's generally implied that people turn to color after engaging in some sort of sexual behavior but people can also turn to color for other reasons such as love, anger or even just things not in the norm for that individual.)

The movie creates a good background for discussing everything from art to book banning and censorship to racism and nudity vs. pornography to sexuality. When do we stand up as opposed to when we stand "with the crowd" and go along?  The standing with the crowd and the standing up happens on both sides of the color situation in Pleasantville, giving a nice contrast of how hard it can be to determine which side to join in some battles because both sides have tenants with which we agree.   The last movie, Stand and Deliver, was pretty straight forward and definitely worth watching with some discussion thrown in.   We just ended up discussing Pleasantville quite a bit more both during and after the movie.