Midweek Mention...Pleasantville

Pleasantville

Dan: It's the Madhouse, patch up! Funhouse. It was Funhouse. That was Funhouse. This is the Madhouse. And we have Pleasantsville to review.

Reegs: Or

Sidey: yeah. I think there was only one Pleasant. But is this related to the theme of the week? Or is it? Yeah. I don't

Reegs: All right. Okay, good. I was

Dan: it was just one of those random weeks where I looked at this film and thought, I've never seen this, it looks quite intriguing. And both of you had seen it.

Sidey: I saw this at the Multiplex. Really? Yeah.

Dan: Okay.

Sidey: Okay. And not since. So it was

Dan: down. Yeah. Trip down memory lane for you. What about you s

Reegs: Yeah, I'd seen this maybe twice before. I think so.

Dan: Okay. Well that's pedigree that you've gone back for more. And this is the, the third time. Third time, a charm. Yeah. We'll find out.

Sidey: Yeah, it starts off with a kind of flicking through the TV channel sort of, trope.

Reegs: Montage y

Sidey: Yeah, and then lands on an old timey station with a marathon viewing of Pleasantville.

Reegs: Yeah. And Pleasantville is a sort of black and white 50s sitcom, preaching sort of traditional values.

Is that...?

Sidey: hear something percolating in the background, it's

Reegs: It's Dan.

Sidey: coffee is percolating. But yeah and it's think happy days but even more prosaic and

Dan: yeah. It's more like, I love Lucy kind of vibe about it and almost canned laughter with every, every joke and it, it.

Basically paints out the perfect American family in the 50s, the nuclear

Sidey: fifties Americana.

Dan: Everybody's happy. And it's like, this is the episode where Bud gets a

Sidey: Yeah, the, the, the, the level of drama in the episodes is, is like incredibly banal.

Reegs: And it's all resolved in 30 minutes, and everything stays the same. And all of that is introduced, like, through this little montage moment, really.

It shows you everything about the show, and I think the intro sequence, and various characters kind of waving, sort of Brady

Bunch

Dan: It's escapism

TV from the 1950s. Just

Sidey: Yeah. And it's

Yes, because all this introduction is then juxtaposed against our two leads, who are Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon.

And they are brother and sister, but... Very different characters and Toby McGuire's character is very introvert and he, we introduced to him. It looks as if he's trying to ask out a very pretty lady and as it transpires, the conversation he's having is with himself and this lady is talking to

someone else and he's just, he's just imagining it,

Dan: talking to like the dream jock over in the, the field and he's pretending he's having that

Reegs: And Maguire is doing his kind of cow eyed, like, far away thing that he

Sidey: it's Peter Parker, basically, not his Spider Man. And Reese with her spoon is far more extrovert, confident,

Reegs: well, she's explicitly a slut.

I mean Well she is,

Dan: Yeah, she's, she's,

Sidey: she's is. I mean, that's her role in the film.

Dan: She's, she's like the cool girl out of Greece or something. You know, she's in that knee in crowd. And she's got friends and little followers rather than friends. And she's

Sidey: DTF'd.

Dan: Yeah, well, there you go then.

Reegs: And she's DT fd.

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: A lot.

Dan: and for those that don't know

Sidey: Down to fuck.

Dan: There you go.

Sidey: So that's that. And I think... They were quickly Yeah, I think.

She

remote.

Well, the drama is that Reese Witherspoon, we should get the

Dan: she's got a date, she's got a big date

Sidey: has got a date with the jock and she's super excited because he's the coolest kid in school and she's lined up to go out with him. And then she's waiting for him to turn up, whereas Tobey Maguire's character David in this world.

It just wants to watch the telly and they're fighting

Reegs: a Pleasantville Marathon.

Sidey: That's right. And they're fighting over the remote. That was a weird way to say that. They're fighting over the remote and as they are both push pulling, you know, tug of war in the remote, it falls out of their hands and smashes into smithereens against the wall.

Dan: Classic. There's little bits of computer circuitry board

Sidey: Very complicated piece of equipment,

Dan: Yeah, I didn't realize there was more to it than just batteries, but there

Reegs: He's literally ringing the bell as

Dan: Well, he's literally ringing the bell as they are still picking up the broken pieces and he says as Ruth Witherspoon yeah, that's her

Sidey: that's her. Jennifer. Yeah.

Dan: And she's like, well, what are you doing here? And he goes, your TV broken? And he goes, good time. And then, and

Reegs: a whole grilling about

Dan: He's a bit

Reegs: and what a nerd he is about how much he, you know, he tries to trick him with some question and David out nerds him.

I can't remember what the

Sidey: Which is which department store. Yeah. So and so bought such and

Dan: So, so this magic TV repairman comment, he's given him a, a brand new remote control after being impressed with the, the Pleasantville knowledge that he was That Toby McGuire's character David is

Sidey: But they haven't learned their lesson and they fight over this one.

And it looks like it could be a prop from a fifties program. It's got that kind of sci-fi aesthetic to it, and they fight over it. And I think it's Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer's character who presses the magic button. And they are, they just do appear then in black and white. Yeah. Transmogrified into, into the Pleasantville itself

Reegs: the world of Pleasantville.

Sidey: Yeah, so it fucking rattles along fairly quickly at the start it's because it's a two hour plus movie this But like the intro bit it's probably only like five six seven minutes. Like it doesn't it doesn't hang around getting

stuck in

Reegs: get straight pretty much into the central conceit we don't fuck about.

Sidey: So the parents now in this world are william h macy's character

Reegs: George.

Sidey: And

Fucking Joan Allen, she's so hot. And she, they have their set routine, which happens in the show, where he comes in and

Reegs: Hi honey, I'm home, hangs his hat up, what's for dinner, you know, it's all

Sidey: his hat up, what's for

dinner,

you know, it's all classic American. And and everything they do only exist on the, in the basis that they exist in the show.

Reegs: Personality traits and that stretches to the sort of spatial geography of Pleasantville itself. It's on a sort of Pac Man style loop where Main Street just goes from one end to the

Sidey: Street and Elm Street and I think it's Jennifer who's just like, well, what's outside of Pleasantville?

And everyone in the class looks around at her and kind of laughs as if they were, fuck are you talking about? we

Dan: It hasn't built, and sister accept that they are not getting out of this world quick. They need to adapt to it. So as not to

Reegs: Well, David's in his element

Sidey: he's loving life,

Reegs: bud. He knows the character. He knows what he's supposed to be

doing

Sidey: straight away recognises that they're in an episode when it's Paul Walker, who I... So, what happened was, I watched this movie on Friday, and then the three of us went out. for beers and whatnot and then we came back to the man cave and watched it again on saturday and it wasn't until someone on the saturday said is that paul walker i did he's so fresh faced and young and i just didn't fucking recognize him at all but it is him and it's it's

Reegs: Jennifer, she's Mary Sue

Sidey: now i was gonna say it's david who's now bud who recognizes when when paul walker's talking to me he says i'm gonna ask her out and i'm thinking of giving her my school pen it's he reck he's like oh my god we're in that episode and so they are literally existing in In episodic world of Pleasantville.

Dan: And and of course having seen it all david tony mcguire, he knows what's coming and tony

Sidey: so we've had Ruth and now we've got Tony. Tony,

Reegs: yeah.

Dan: Never mind stick with us out there stick with us or stick with me anyway Because I will get all the names wrong at least another five or six time before we get through this review but He then is living the life of this character, and he embraces it. He goes into the basketball court, he

Reegs: They, they never miss a shot. All the basketball players, they just, they shoot after

Sidey: completely perfect. So they, like you

Reegs: Well, but is it

Sidey: well, well, as they get, when they get there, it is. So like

Dan: the

Sidey: we see the basketball training and every drill they do is completely perfect and you can't miss a shot and then at the end the whole team shoot at the same time and it's just

Reegs: Yeah, it's amazing.

It's There's, there's a few examples like that, But then you can also see that there are things that are not quite right.

There's sort of wonky structure of the sitcom world, because he goes to work at a diner where Jeff Daniels...

Sidey: is

right, Yeah. Jeff

Reegs: Yeah, yeah, Jeff Daniels is, is working and he plays Bill. Bill Johnson, who'll be an important character. And but Bill is, like, stuck in his routine because Bud didn't turn up at the right time.

So he's, like, still stuck washing down the counter. And

Sidey: through the laminate.

Reegs: gone through the laminate because Bud didn't come to, like, move the glasses or whatever. And he says to him, Oh, you know, if I'm not here, you can do that yourself, sort of thing. And you can almost

Sidey: almost... I would have said, listen, don't fucking tell me what to do. I'm the boss.

Dan: the boss. But he's just out of his element, and they haven't done these things before, and they are essentially just characters still forming their personality

Sidey: but it's just the fact that they are

Dan: Very Truman Show

Sidey: It's almost like Truman show in reverse. In

Reegs: like Truman Show in reverse.

Sidey: And it just, the fact that they are there and they have free will, they are starting to deconstruct the world of Pleasantville.

Reegs: deconstruct the world of Pleasantville. Yeah, they're very, and you know, primarily it starts out in a sexual way, really, because it's

Sidey: They do call it Lover's Lane or Lover's whatever it is, but they don't,

they just go there.

She

Reegs: goes there with Paul Walker and there are other cars there with music and things going, but they're not doing what's going on in Paul Walker's car cuz he looks very perplexed by shocked. And

Dan: Well you think, it's not in...

Sidey: 58, it's 1958.

Dan: 50s. Yeah, America. They're very, very conservative. People aren't looking to get the first base, second base, third base. I mean, holding hands was seen as a big thing.

Giving a, giving a, a pin was seen as a major

Sidey: and

Dan: and it was all very, you know, apple pie, main street and absolutely

Sidey: I thought that William H. Macy and Joan Allen's characters had probably fucked twice, and that was it.

Dan: Yeah, like that's it. Both children that, that. That sort of sorts that bit out. But of course

Sidey: Mary Sue Parker.

Dan: Reece,

Reece Witherspoon though. She's Ruth Witherspoon. She's from the modern era and she's got a fellow in a car and she fancies him. She's going to let him know all about it. So she's taking it to another level with, with Paul Walker here.

Reegs: Yeah,

Dan: Much, much to actually David, her brother's like, dismay,

Reegs: she's, her character is supposed to be going out with, with Whitey anyway because Whitey's gonna turn out because of being spurned effectively is gonna turn out to be one of the villains of the piece along with Big Bob who we're gonna meet in a bit.

Dan: That's right, so they're they're all

still finding their way and, and

Sidey: with Big Bob, who we're going to meet in a bit.

That's right, so they're all still finding their way in, and,

Dan: well, they've already had a warning from the TV repair guy who got upset when he...

Was asked about why the fuck are we here and he's going, Oh, you're not grateful about all this and I'm going to go and I'll see you in a week. So they know they're

Reegs: they're on a ticking

Dan: they know that they're trapped until they see this guy back again, because he's the one that gave him the remote and he's the one that's magic them into this world.

He'll be the one to get them out.

Sidey: Yeah, and because people are now things are starting to appear in glorious technicolor.

Reegs: Yeah. So we didn't probably make enough of this, that it's all black and white and then Yeah. People are

Sidey: I think it's a flower first. There's a rose or something appears in red.

Dan: after Paul Walker and, and Rhys Witherspoon have

Sidey: Witherspoon. Mary Sue.

Dan: together, Mary Sue have got together he drives back along and there's one red rose in the hedge.

And it obviously sticks out, as a red rose would do in a black and white

Sidey: because she makes the comment, oh God, I'm so pasty when she arrives in black and white.

Yeah.

Reegs: And he sees this red rose and, and then suddenly there are these little bursts of colour and it starts to affect people. I really want to talk about the scene really where Reese Witherspoon tells her mum about masturbating and she climaxes so hard she sets a tree on fire.

Sidey: Yeah I thought about that, what that conversation must have been like.

Mother, daughter to mother. Like frig yourself, go and run yourself a bath, and frig yourself off do it like this, it'd probably help. Weird. Fucking weird.

Reegs: It's called, where they

Sidey: And It starts off with Joan Allen saying, asking about what happens at Lover's Lane, or whatever the hell it's called, where they go. And she says, well, sex.

And she's like, oh, right, okay. And what's

Reegs: so

Sidey: there? Yeah.

so

she

must say like, you know, you bang me or whatever. And she's like, oh, okay. And I think, has she met Jeff Daniel's

Reegs: I don't think so, not yet, no.

Sidey: that definitely arouses some feeling

Reegs: later, it's after the wanking fire tree.

Sidey: so Yeahs a

Reegs: funny sequence, because we've seen the fireman out earlier rescuing a cat from a tree.

And then there's an actual fire in Pleasantville, a real fire, it's glorious Technicolor fire in their garden. And nobody's doing anything, there's never been one. And when Maguire goes to the fire department, he shouts, It's fire, fire, and they just look at him like, what are you, and then he goes, it's a cat!

Dan: And they spring

Reegs: Everybody springs into action.

Sidey: yeah but that out of everything in the movie that's what i do remember from seeing it what this what was this

98?

something like that that this is the the scene this because i just not because it's a sexual thing per se, but because it's the daughter explaining to the mum how to do it, I was like, that is just fucking far out.

And that couple with now we've had the fire, they've never obviously seen fire before, they're not fucking cavemen, they don't understand fire.

When Bud, David, slash Bud,

goes to the diner to his job the next day, everyone's there, and they want to question him, like, how did you know, like, what? Is that how did you know about

Reegs: How did you know what to do?

Sidey: And so what i've seen it, you know

Reegs: I've been outside. Well, he was,

Sidey: Outside of pleasantville and that is like fucking dropping bombs. They're

Reegs: over. Mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan: Everybody's looking at him like he's the coolest person in the world.

Sidey: It's accelerating now the the colorification It's

Reegs: it's still massively a minority though.

Dan: We've got a,

Sidey: it's

Reegs: but

Dan: a mayor.

Reegs: yeah, well, I was gonna say disturbed at what's going on, there's the mayor, big Bob isn't there? And he, he, he's like, He's sort of seducing some of the, like, white, older men of the town, like, David's father into coming, Oh, I'll give you a seat on the council, you can have a pin just like mine if we can uphold upstanding Pleasantville values.

So it's all this sort of coded language,

Dan: and And, you see people's colour or people being able to see colour or, you know, actually Becoming technicolor

Reegs: Once

Dan: when,

yeah, once they start to break down an image or have an idea of them themselves, I mean, it didn't necessarily mean that they had to have sex to get color or

Sidey: to get color.

No, they they think that at first. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's been a been a major catalyst for people's awakening to different ideas but it's not that for every person.

Dan: more

Reegs: Mary Sue who says it. She's like, I've knocked off like ten guys since I've been here, how come I'm not in colour? And Maguire's like, no, it's about an act of expression. That's what, you know, that is basically what's going to

Dan: And he's still black and white for long periods of the film. But then he has a color moment as well.

Reegs: Yeah, when he's protecting his mother later, but he brings a book of art, so books now of suddenly, all the books in the libraries are blank but the ones that Maguire and Whatsochops Mary Sue can remember have started populating with words.

And this is because the

Dan: Mary Sue can remember have started populating the first.

Reegs: when

Sidey: Just just by kind of recounting the story of what it's about the the books populate themselves.

Yeah.

Reegs: books populate themselves. It's a

book of

Sidey: a book of

Reegs: art. Bill

has mentioned before that he is responsible for decorating

fucking, he's like seeing Picasso and well, you know, some, there's starry nights in there and all sorts of shit.

And yeah,

Sidey: yeah.

But and while he's at the door Betty. Catches a glimpse of him and you can straight away you're like they either they either know each other from before or straight away. There's like a real romantic connection. She's she's got the hots for him and and vice versa. um,

Dan: Married to William H. Macy, who, who is,

Sidey: he seems to have a hard time in things that we watch because he would you.

Difficult relationship in Boogie

Dan: Yeah, he's got that face, isn't he, where he just seems... Yeah, hang dog, and he would take a lot of punishment and

Sidey: He's, he's really confused. He's very, very traditional in this. And he's very confused about all this stuff that's going along and that's not helped by big Bob is kind of like really reinforcing that this is, this is all wrong and we should go back to traditional values. So

Reegs: And his wife has gone coloured. And Betty, she

Sidey: she tries to hide it.

Reegs: it. And she reveals to Bud that she's coloured now. And then he helps her disguise herself using grey makeup. And eventually that'll play out in a sort of romantic scene where she... goes out and comes across Bill's artwork.

He's been obsessed since he's seen this book. He's been painting endlessly in the diner and she sees his artwork and goes in to see him. And he, she cries as they talk about the differing interpretation of a

Sidey: They're looking at a Picasso, it's the blue one, the ones, and he says, Oh, look at the way she's like resting on her arm. And she says, no, she's crying. And he's like, looks at it then differently.

It's like, oh,

Reegs: yeah, my God. Honestly, if it doesn't get you somewhere in the fields, this movie, even though it is completely sentimental Schulz, but

Sidey: schmuck. So they're clearly like, you can see the, the, the. The direction of traffic with these two is going to end up with some homewrecking going on

Dan: Well, it kind of does because cut to the next scene or a scene soon after it, you've got a, a young boy delivering his papers on his bike going down Main Street or Elm Street, whichever one it is that, that Bill lives on in the diners at.

And he crashes it over just off screen. You can hear the bike. Kind of fall over in the camera pans round to the boy on the floor picking himself up in a Technicolor nude of What would

Sidey: It's Betty.

Reegs: Betty. Betty, yeah.

Sidey: Nipples and

Reegs: her sexual liberation that's made her coloured has inflamed Bill's artistic

Dan: and a crowd start, yeah.

Reegs: thing here. And then Bi

Sidey: handed, doesn't it?

Reegs: Well, it's not handed, isn't it? Well, it's George whips it up inadvertently because he comes home, Honey, hi honey, I'm home, hangs his hat up,

Sidey: Where's my dinner?

Reegs: Where's my dinner? He finds himself eventually at the bowling alley explaining this to another, like a

Dan: like a group of people.

Gasping men who can't believe what she wasn't

Reegs: It could be any of us.

Dan: could be

Reegs: It could be, it could be you. No dinner. So yeah, they're

Dan: dinner. No dinner, you get

put your hat down and go, Hi honey, I'm home. Actually

Reegs: I'm home.

Actually, I probably make dinner four times a week, I would say.

Dan: You're on actual recording saying this. He's not gonna edit that out.

Reegs: No, it's true.

Sidey: also do all the cooking,

Dan: I do all the cooking and she's never gonna listen. I do all the cooking and all the cleaning

Sidey: Right, okay.

Well, well done. Well, it wouldn't be a fact, you know, a factor for us, but back here it really is and

Reegs: listen. All the cooking and all the old guy, old white guys, you know, this is, this allows Big furore.

And as the bursts of expression are happening, Lover's Lane, Lover's Lane has become this, like, Garden of Eden, Paradise, where I mean,

Dan: an orgy! What are you doing back there? They're all at it down there, aren't they? Yeah,

Reegs: they?

She literally, Margaret, his sort of girlfriend, literally gives Maguire a sort of apple in the garden, don't they? And she turns coloured and so people, colour bursting everywhere and all this, but then there's... It's still

Sidey: It's just more and more So that colour out.

 The crowd's been whipped up into a frenzy and you know, the way these things go is they fucking rip chairs up off the floor and benches and pile them through the window and just completely vandalise and destroy

Reegs: because of the thing of Betty. The image of Betty is so incensed them, and the diner itself is a kind of beacon,

Dan: They're not used to this kind of you know, erotic. Pictures and imagery. So it all goes to court, doesn't it? You've got the mayor in the town hall at least, anyway.

Reegs: it, it's not caught yet. First of all, you get like a town hall meeting where. This is where they outlaw right. They have, they come up with this sort of coded thing. The Pleasantville,

Sidey: Right, book burning, isn't it?

Reegs: later? Yeah. Yeah, they do go into that pretty much.

And they outlawed, you know, different, you can only have certain types of music and you color can only use black and gray paints despite others being available and all this so, McGuire and. Jeff Daniels come up with this plan, basically, to, to really express themselves, talk about it all on the big wall outside the courthouse, and they sort of paint this big mural of all of the things that have happened, the book burning, Lover's Lane, the mural itself that's been destroyed earlier,

all of it up there, all the features of the town.

Sidey: Well, I think it's that it's now that Betty gets accosted, doesn't she, by a group of fellas and it's up to Bud slash David to, he, he sort of sees it going on and wades in and he think he punches one of the guys, which scares them away.

And that's the act that is

Dan: Brings

Sidey: bring the color out in

Reegs: out

Dan: bit of violence is what he needed.

Sidey: And kind of simultaneously, Mary Sue, Ruth, with her spoon, has actually decided that the

Dan: She's gonna play it straighter.

Sidey: Being

quite so promiscuous is not actually doing anything for her and so she's gonna hit the books.

Reegs: Yeah, she reads D. H. Lawrence and, but

Dan: And she can't believe it. She's like, wow, this is pretty racy stuff. And he's, Harry Maguire's

Sidey: chops appears, he appears on the lawn, doesn't he? And says, come on, let's go and fuck. And she's like, no, no, I'm going to stay in tonight and read. And he's like, what?

Reegs: So anyway, they do that big act of rebellion, the painting, and they're arrested and he has a conversation with his father, bud, where he brings him a jar of olives, cuz he doesn't know what else to bring him.

And then they eat to, and yeah, so it sets up this kind of kangaroo court where they haven't got a lawyer and they're go, they're paraded in front of this old, it's literal segregation. You've got all the colored folk up top. And a gallery. And a gallery and lower gallery of black and white

Dan: of course, Mayor Bob's there. He's as black and white as they come. And he's laying the law down. He's saying it how he sees it. And it doesn't look good for Jeff Daniels and Tobey Maguire who are both there. Jeff Daniels starts...

Rattling off something, but he's not really going anywhere

Reegs: kind of apologizing.

He said, I didn't mean to hurt anyone. If I'd have painted it differently, if I could have painted something different or, you know, then it wouldn't have happened, sort of thing. Or,

Dan: But and Toby McGuire gives this impassioned speech about you know, there's different things than just pleasant. Sometimes you've got to be a bit dangerous, sometimes you've got to be a bit fast or slow, you know, there's, there's other things in and around this mediocre world that we've painted out for ourselves and, and just kept on an even keel and, and, and so, he, he manages to incite Mayor Bob enough until he starts shouting and he pops into colour after saying he would never,

you

know, it would

Reegs: Well, he gets William H.

Macy to do it first. He gets him to talk about his wife, doesn't he? And he says, look at, you know, think about, like, not just the food and shit that she cooks. Like, look at her and all that, and he literally changes colour. And then, like you say, Big Bob gets wound up to the point that he goes as well,

Dan: So we're getting Technicolour out there, and then somebody rushes inside just as Mayor Bob has run outside and says, gotta look at this, and you go outside and the whole world is suddenly blue sky and there's colour TV

Reegs: a big swirling score as well.

Dan: yeah.

Reegs: Na, na, na,

Sidey: Now the roads even lead to other destinations,

Reegs: yeah.

Yeah, and with the plot sort of nicely getting wrapped up, the beds are a lot, are bigger, the because that's been a thing that's been quite funny and the TV shows that there are other places, and the buses go elsewhere, and bud is now finally ready to go back home, but Mary Sue isn't. She prefers her life here. And now she gets on a bus to Springfield, which means she's in the

Sidey: Is this the Simpsons universe?

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: and suddenly they have gained the power of just going back whenever they like, and, and I'll just pop back later

Reegs: Actually, Bud had the remote, he hid the remote earlier because he didn't want to go back, so he could have possibly

Dan: He could have gone back and got that control, but, it cuts back to the weird old magic guy, TV guy again, before we, we nod off.

And I was nodding off at this stage, to be honest. I had to watch the last 20 again. But that was more to do with the, the meal, the food, the beers that we'd had, I think.

Reegs: So, Maguire says a sort of tearful goodbye to his girlfriend and fake mum. And then does, like, which he's known for all of about 15 minutes, but they treat it as a massive thing. And then he fucks off back to the real world, where only a small amount of time has passed. And his mother is crying at the table.

She wasn't really going on a holiday. She's having, like, a crisis about her life. Why is her life so shit? She's chosen bad

Sidey: She

seems to have been, like, jilted, he's, I think

Reegs: her dad, I think the implication was he died, the

Sidey: Oh right, I thought he'd done a runner, but either way, she's flying solo

Reegs: yeah,

Dan: and then all the boyfriends haven't worked out and she's kind of crying into her hands on the table and he

Sidey: He comforts her.

Dan: Yeah, he comforts her and tidies up her tears a bit with a pillow and she's like, oh,

Sidey: where did

Dan: you learn that? We're not a pillow a tissue.

It's like it's

Sidey: He smothers her.

Reegs: pillow. Yeah,

Dan: but it's just loads

Reegs: her out of her misery.

Dan: Pillow

Reegs: he says, you know, she says, Oh, it's not supposed to be like this. And he says something like, it's not supposed to be anything.

Dan: And he said, I've had a very good day. As if just to rub it in and then it

Reegs: And then more of that Maguire stuff, like staring into the

Dan: Yeah. And then it, it, it, it finally fi finishes.

Sidey: And there's a montage of people in

Reegs: go back to Pleasantville for a really strange ending on the bench. Where George is sitting next to Betty and he says, oh, something like, I don't know what's going to happen next. And it pans to Betty. George, and she says, oh, and then it goes back to him, but George is no longer George. He's Bill and He says, oh, I don't know either and then smiles and

Sidey: yeah, I wasn't sure what to make of that.

Reegs: No

Sidey: Maybe, I don't know. Dunno let's skip on it.

Reegs: A movie that's, like, about such, like, beautiful things. It's hard to, like, completely tear it apart, but on this time I watched it, there were a few things that made me uncomfortable, like, a whole, a movie that's massively about racial segregation doesn't have a single black character in it,

Dan: No, it didn't, no.

Reegs: and so, you know, that is a bit troublesome, but, you know, it being about the, you know, the director says it himself, right?

He says the movie is about the fact that personal repression gives rise to larger political oppression and that when we're afraid of certain things in ourselves, Or we're afraid of change. We project those fears onto other things. So, you know, it, what a great sentiment and to show that stuff in such a visually

Dan: Yeah, no, it was. It was, it was a visually interesting way. And I liked around about 80% of this film.

Sidey: Strong ratio.

Dan: I think so. It may even go up into 85%, but there was

Sidey: gee whiz

Dan: of it that just kind of made me think, I don't know whether it was like they had a longer, A longer edit, and then they've cut it down,

Reegs: I think it suffers from having like some of its logic is like a little bit poorly thought out against the themes of the movie and they like don't work very well with each other sometimes but like I say it's often such a beautiful idea and expressed so nicely.

But

Dan: Sort of a good, you know, hour and a half.

I'm really into it, really liked

Sidey: didn't need to be two hours. I mean, it,

Dan: but it didn't need to be maybe two hours and there was, there was just, yeah, it just seemed a little loosely tied together and I just thought it might have explained itself a little

Reegs: better.

But look, sensational score is great if overly sentimental actors are brilliant. I

Dan: just so, I

Reegs: ideas unique and interesting.

Dan: One of those where you think This could have been even better.

I think that's where the disappointment

Sidey: think it was like, it was as good as they were going to make it. Joan Allen is hot and she wanks in the

Dan: wanks

Sidey: strong

Reegs: Sets fire to a tree by wanking, it's amazing. You can't say that about a lot of movies, can you?

Sidey: No, hardly any of them, in fact.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: No, hardly any, in fact. None I've seen.

This is it.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: Do you want to know financials for it? Because it costs 60 million US to make. 60 it's quite a lot for, you know, it's not a big action, like, summer blockbuster movie, so

Dan: probably only made that back.

Sidey: Not quite even, at 50 mil at the box

Dan: Not quite a box

Sidey: So, bit of a loser.

Dan: off me on

Sidey: It had some technical stuff around the, the black and whiteness and all that sort of stuff, which was like a technical first, I think it had the, the most amount of digital effects,

Reegs: Of?

Sidey: Until No,

no, the best film out of the Star Wars 9.

Dan: Jar Jar

Sidey: Phantom Menace, yeah,

Reegs: Corrupt.

Sidey: So if that doesn't do it for you, nothing

Dan: Wow. Okay. Factoid.