1
Forrest Gump is a rare movie that succeeded on all levels.It was a box office smash ranking among the top five highest grossing movies of all time.But it was also a critical darling,garnering across the board praise and a truckload of awards.The movie became a cultural phenomenon,spawning cook books,quote books,a top ten soundtrack album and lines like "stupid is as stupid does" and "life is like a box of chocolates,you never know what you're gonna get" have permeated our dialect.The movie has a nostalgic,feel good vibe thanks to the dimwitted Forrest's trek through 60's and 70's touchstone events.Underneath all those warm feelings lies a darkness.Bad things happen to just about everyone Forrest comes in contact with.His best friend Bubba is killed in Vietnam,his other friend Lt.Dan loses both his legs,his mother dies of cancer and his beloved Jenny dies of AIDS.Even the famous people Forrest comes across meet with disaster,President Kennedy & John Lennon are assassinated,George Wallace is shot and Elvis Presley dies young.There are superb performances all around.Sally Field is feisty as Forrest's mama,Mykelti Williamson is funny as Bubba,Gary Sinese as Lt.Dan is a perfect rough edged foil to Forrest and Robin Wright as Jenny portrays the confusion that young people of the times felt perfectly.While all those performances are of high quality,Forrest Gump is Tom Hanks' tour de force.He is utterly brilliant as Forrest.He is in virtually every scene of the movie and never once does he fail to astound.He becomes Forrest and makes you care what happens to him.Mr.Hanks deservedly won his second consecutive Best Actor Oscar for the role and cemented himself as the best actor of his generation and one of the best of all time.
2
I think the merits of Forrest Gump as a movie have been debated enough by now.If you're reading this,you probably already have a pretty good idea if the movie's digitally enhanced nostalgia and praise to the virtues of simplicity will appeal to you or not.So I'm just going to talk about what I thought of the DVD.The film enthusiast and the Gump fan will find a fair amount of interesting stuff to peruse,but the bonus feature are unfortunately kind of hit or miss.It's neat seeing exactly how all of the special effects were done or how sound and makeup were used to enhance mood in particular scenes.The screen test are nice enough,if only because you get to see Tom Hanks playing Forrest before he had worked out the accent.And the Zemeckis/Starket/Carter commentary,while lacking the fun and spontanaity of some I've heard,provides enough good tidbits and insights to keep you interested.But these pretty good features run alongside some really poor ones.The Finerman commentary runs out of steam very early and lapses into the producer repeating herself (apparently there are at least TWO seperate scenes where Forrest first becomes a man) and talking about what she thinks the audience is feeling or thinking at that point in the movie.(I don't need to know what the audience is thinking.I AM the audience.) Add a photo gallery that is half stills from the movie and a pretty bland documentary and you pretty much have the disc in a nutshell.I guess if you really love Gump or absolutely need to know more about the effects,you'll really enjoy the disc.But the rest of us are left a little unsatisfied and wondering why a movie that supposedly relied more on a great script than visual effects has a disc of extras which touch so little on the former and so much on the latter.
3
I think that the best movies are those that you 'appreciate' or understand after seeing it more than once.However,with 'forrest gump',i fell in love with it after the first 15 minutes and knew it would be in my top 10 straight away.
It is so unique because of the character Forrest Gump himself,who has a low IQ of only 75.Although he is 'mentally challenged',he finds himself in historic and troublesome situations and like that he manages to 'forrest gump' his way out of it and end up a hero or role model.but the real beauty in this movie to me was his ability to simplify the complexities of the world we live in and somehow do what some war movies fail to do.show the importance of world peace or what love movies can't deliver...the importance of love.
I love that Forrest doesn't lose his innocence and purity throughout the movie,or maybe he just can't but either way,this shows you don't need to be evil or really intelligent to be recognised or successful.Then again it is just a movie (and a very good one too).So maybe it doesn't work like that in reality.what that simply means is that the acting and story of this film was incredibly touching on a real level.And in my definition that's what a good movie should be able to do.