Rethinking Forrest Gump
by Scott Hardie on October 6, 2006
Inspired by a conversation this past weekend, I've been thinking about the once-popular movie Forrest Gump. It has fallen out of favor with people who prefer its contemporaries Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption and believe it robbed them of Oscars, but to me all three films are good. Gump succeeds because of a lot of factors, but consider its acting and its visual effects. I've often heard it said that a bad performance is when you're aware it's only an actor playing a role instead of disappearing into it convincingly. Tom Hanks had starred in a dozen box-office hits by that point in his career and was the reiging Best Actor from the year before, and yet despite his familiarity to millions of moviegoers, some people still believed he was genuinely retarded because he played Gump so well. That's acting! Along the same lines, the best visual effects are said to be the ones you never notice. Gary Sinise was unknown then, but some people actually thought he was a legless actor, or even more outrageously, that he actually had his legs amputated for the role! Either the acting and the special effects were so very good as to lead people to outlandish conclusions as plausible explanations for them, or the audience for the film was as dumb as its hero. Even I'm not cynical enough to believe the latter.
One Reply to Rethinking Forrest Gump
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
De-Gifting
I'd like to think I'm getting better at white elephant games since I play them every December, but evidence proves otherwise: After losing out on a crock pot, a board game, a video game, a sushi kit, a yoga mat, and a nightrobe, I finally took home a Z-grade zombie movie on DVD, and a Ben Franklin t-shirt. Woo! On the other hand, I scored a quesadilla maker at another party that has been pretty good so far. Go »5 Horror Board Game Recommendations
Someone asked me recently to suggest a few good horror-themed board games. With Halloween coming up, I decided to write out a list in case it gives anyone else ideas for something fun to get and play. These are in order from most kid-friendly to least. Go »Going Green
This thing might turn out to be as short-lived as my other two attempts at a personal blog, but damn it if I haven't craved having such an outlet for the better part of a year now. It seems like a week doesn't go by that I don't have some little adventure to turn into an anecdote or a frustration to rant about. My idle thoughts are as pointless as anybody else's, I realize, but that's what the Internet is for (besides porn). Go »Spiders on Drugs
Thanks, Aaron. (link) Go »Kids Again
Kelly is a big Kids in the Hall fan, so I bought her tickets to see them for our first anniversary. And since they were playing at Universal Studios in Orlando, we decided to make a day of it at the theme park, which became a whole weekend getaway. And since I like sharing my opinions at length on the Internet, here's what I thought of each part. Go »
Kris Weberg | October 15, 2006
The acting in Forrest Gump is fine. The problem with the film is thatr, aside from being a rather nice little tour of popular accounts of American history, it doesn't really add up to much of anything. The moral seems to be that simple-minded platitudes and a certain obliviousness equate to virtue. The plot is simply a contrivance to insert Forrest into as many recent historical events as possible without having much to say about any of them.
It looks very nice and it's quite pleasant for the running time (at least on a first viewing), but it's a fairly pointless film when all is said and done. And that, more than anything else, is why its reputation has suffered in comparison to the moral challenges of Pulp Fiction and the meatier study of virtue and character in The Shawshank Redemption.