Rented, and saw, Pleasantville. Peculiar movie - two movies, really, one of which was irritating and pompous, the other breezy and amusing. Modern kids go back into a black and white 50s sitcom; fine premise, and they got the look of the old shows just right. Black and white and a million shades in between. (When color finally worked its way into this world it actually looked garish and cheap, like a bad singing voice spoiling the perfection of a silent movie.) But then the movie became a political allegory, at which point it degenerated into a smug and simplistic tirade against the Bad Old Past, the boring stifling world of conformity that enlightened souls so considerately tore apart. The 50s are a convenient whipping boy, seen through modern eyes, but the movies always seem like their beating a horse because it's not a Jeep.

Pleasantville began with a horrible picture of modern life - parents who don't care about their kids, kids raised by TV, sexually transmitted diseases rampant - and then tries to convince us that promiscuity and extra-marital affairs are good, because they're honest. The very world the main characters lived in was a direct result of the world they made when they went back in the past.

The most telling moment, for me, was when the mayor, a big evil authority figure, finally lost his control and yelled - at which point he too turned into color. Repression of one's emotions is unnatural, hence inauthentic. Let it all hang out, baby. Criminey. And after that, everyone files outside to find that the entire world is in color; it's supposed to be an oooh-aahh moment. But now the little town looks utterly ordinary. At this point the movie has stumbled over its own metaphors - since we all live in the world of color, the world of black and white looks beautiful. Color looks like Paradise, Lost. (The postlapsarian message was played out elsewhere in the film, where a girl gives the hero . . . an apple. In the garden. Okay, got it.)

No, I'm not reading too much into it, and no, it wasn't a bad movie; many nice scenes and clever touches. But it ignored its own lessons and conclusions, and just wasn't as deep as it thought it was. In the latter hours of the movie (it felt about four hours long) one of the aggravated citizens puts a sign in his store window: NO COLOREDS. At this point I felt free to critique the movie as a political & cultural allegory, but I realized that they had made an awful mistake: they were equating the right of 50s teens to have sex with the effort of blacks to break down government-sanctioned laws that deprived them of their constitutional rights. Uh-uh. Not analogous. Not even close.

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My karma ran over your dogma.
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