Pleasantville Is An Impressive Showcase For Effective Satire, Memorable Visuals And Jeff Daniels

It's so much fun to go in totally cold into a first-time watch of a movie and become totally enchanted by discovering where exactly that movie is going. Movie marketing can be so spoiler-heavy, it's totally a wonder when the secrets and plot outline of a movie remain a mystery, especially when it's twenty-one-years-old like Pleasantville! The directorial debut of Gary Ross, I was aware of this movie being a star vehicle for Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon and that it was done in black-and-white but other than that, the concrete details of the production remained a mystery to me. This meant my first-time-viewing of Pleasantville turned out to be such a delightful experience as I got to unearth all the joys this movie has to offer!

How Can A Man Go On After Seeing The Horrors Of War? Brothers Examines that Very Question To Fantastic Results

MINOR SPOILERS FOR BROTHERS FOLLOW

Those Amazing Spider-Man movies unleashed a number of terrible things upon our world, but one of the worst was this phenomenon I saw where the arrival of a new Spider-Man immediately meant the previous incarnation of the character must be torn down and defiled lest he distract even a tiny bit from Andrew Garfield's Spider-Stalker interpretation of the character (which wasted an absolutely phenomenal actor in regards to Andrew Garfield). I saw too many social media posts declaring Tobey Maguire to be a "weird" actor who was "whiny" and "stupid" and all that jazz and that just struck me as so weird and as shallow criticisms.

Spider-Man 2 Review (Classic Write-Up)

Every summer blockbuster sequel wants to be The Empire Strikes Back. After all, that was one of the first major summer blockbuster follow-ups of its kind in a post-Jaws/Star Wars/Superman: The Movie world and it's still regarded today as the best film in the entire Star Wars saga. What many take away from the artistic success of The Empire Strikes Back is that it was solely the darker elements of the story that made it good. Thus, ya get a lot of summer blockbusters that tweak the color grading to harsher colors and toss in a lot of violence in order to become the next Empire Strikes Back. But that specific element is not what made that Irvin Kershner film so beloved. It was the fact that Empire Strikes Back dove deeper into its characters psyche, tested them, put them in new more morally complex situations that challenged them and the audience. Oh, and it was also well-made, full of fun action, Yoda was an incredible creation from his first line of dialogue onward, ya get the idea.

Spider-Man Review

For 50 years, the thought had crept into the minds of everyone across the planet...what would a Spider-Man movie look like? For some, it was just a passing mental diversion, a notion that would fade as quickly as it came. For others, it was a concept that persisted in their cranium, imagining what the web-crawler would look like in the realm of live-action cinema. Considering how much of a grip Spider-Man had had on pop culture, it's understandable why such a proposal would have inhabited the imaginations of billions of individuals around the world. The comic book saga of meek Peter Parker gaining superhero abilities had emerged as one of the great modern-day fictional media creations.

Lana Del Rey Deserved Better Than The 2013 Great Gatsby (When Good Songs Happen To Bad Movies)

Welcome to a new bi-weekly column called When Good Songs Happen To Bad Movies, in which I look at pretty well done songs that just so happened to debut in more subpar features.

Lots can be said about Baz Luhrmann's 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but one can never say that the feature had a shortage of bombastic elements. Whether such elements were actually good or not is another debate (I'd say mostly not), but it is one of the more audacious movies made in recent years, with 3D being utilized to help fully sell the absorbing atmosphere of the era while rap music populates 1920's environments.