Tonight we watched the movie Pleasantville. I hadn't seen it in a long time, and a friend who was visiting from New York had never seen it. A great movie, and it's held its own over time--well-written script, excellent acting, powerful story. At the beginning of the movie when the main characters travel back to the 1950's, the scenes are in black and white, life is predictable and pleasant, but things begin to change.
As movie critic Roger Ebert writes, "Pleasantville is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. Yes, we have more problems. But also more solutions, more opportunities and more freedom."
As writers, we're free to use the whole rainbow spectrum of colors, the whole palette to capture the magnificent and tragic range of the human experience on the page. Is writing in technicolor risky, dangerous, unpredictable? Recently Mark Twain's masterpiece Huckleberry Finn has been in the news. Should some of his language be changed, toned down, because people now find it offensive? It's been interesting to follow this debate.
As movie critic Roger Ebert writes, "Pleasantville is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. Yes, we have more problems. But also more solutions, more opportunities and more freedom."
As writers, we're free to use the whole rainbow spectrum of colors, the whole palette to capture the magnificent and tragic range of the human experience on the page. Is writing in technicolor risky, dangerous, unpredictable? Recently Mark Twain's masterpiece Huckleberry Finn has been in the news. Should some of his language be changed, toned down, because people now find it offensive? It's been interesting to follow this debate.
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