Leaderboard

TOM SCHARPLING and MARTHA KELLY return to take the Triumph at Comic-Con episode on tour.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. Ewan is, of course, amazing in the film, but one thing I really liked is casting Henry fucking Thomas to act opposite Danny Torrence. I know he's a frequent collaborator of Flanagan's (Haunting of Hill House is magnificent horror storytelling), but it just seems so perfect to have the "kid from ET" to play the ghost version of the father of the other most famous child role of the last 40 years.

10,000%. Also, that was the ideal way of selling it to my daughter. "Look who's in it! TROY!"

My thoughts pretty much echo everything already said. I liked this movie when I was younger, but I think I just liked it because society was telling me I should or something, because even as a kid watching it I remember being like "okay well now I've seen it, and I'll proceed to forget pretty much everything about it." Besides the like most iconic parts of this film, I think this is very forgettable. I am shocked that it made it onto this list.

I really enjoyed this! After a while I did start to think that it kinda dragged on, but I can totally tell it was Mike's style of horror and I looooove Haunting of Hill House with my entire heart! Rebecca Ferguson killed this roll and I agree that Ewan did a lot better than I've seen in quite sometime! I'm afraid that people that don't like it are blaming it on the film itself, when I found the things that I didn't like as much to be direct adaptations of Stephen King lol. He can get so silly in his writing sometimes and so many things hearkened back to Dreamcatcher for me and I was like okay Stephen we get it you're obsessed with this concept lol.

Maybe somebody could help clear this crucial plot point up for me. So at the very end of the movie we find out that Jurgen Prochnow and Madonna were working together to kill the old man and take his money. So much so me made false threatening phone calls to be used in the trail to prove his ulterior motives and give further evidence she was innocent. Okay, but why? I mean wouldn't it have been easier for him to just not get involved at all? Yes the guy who died was his patient and Madonna "left" Jurgen for the victim in their story but why didn't he just lie to the police in the first place? Like he could have easily been like "No, I never introduced her to the victim. I'm not sure how they met. Yes we dated briefly but it didn't work out for personal reasons." Why get all tangled up in the trail?

It does have some throwbacks to The Shining that are kinda jarring (especially in the beginning), but it is its own story and is much more emotionally engaging than Kubrick’s iconic, chilly film (which I do like). Ewan McGregor has his best part in a while (that I’ve seen) and is great, but the whole main cast gives really strong performances. I did like the book that this was based on and I generally like Mike Flanagan’s horror films a lot (he did Gerald’s Game and The Haunting of Hill House series for Netflix, as well as Oculus and others), but the preview for this left me underwhelmed, so I was pleasantly surprised with the result. I think it’s the strongest theatrical adaptation of a King novel in a long time, but I don’t want to over-hype it. I’m interested in what other people think.

In the Sixties? Being *in* college could keep you out of the draft, but it’s not like being a college graduate meant you would never go, or not be conscripted into, the military. Hell, we had recruitment officers at my college all the time and that wasn’t all that long ago. Also, even if you disregard all that, and it’s true that college graduates usually don’t join the army, that only makes it more clearly fate. At that point in the movie, Forrest was at a crossroads. What exactly was he going to do now? He doesn’t seek out the military. The Army guy just happens to (fate?) come up to him at that *specific* moment. A moment when he’s not sure what to do next. Again, he makes choices, but those choices are built within a destined framework. Or, as he puts it, it’s both free will and fate.

He probably would've been drafted. If you were in college then you were exempt. I'm not sure about them drafting college graduates, though, nor do I know about how they recruit back in the day. I know now they definitely want them before they hit 24, because that's when a man's brain stops growing, so they very much are trying to mold minds to be exactly how they want them to be.

Ain’t no party like a goatless party ‘cause a goatless party got no goats

Speaking of New York, a lot of it was filmed at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn.

When pizza’s on a bagel, I don’t eat pizza at all.

I just came across a site that contains a full early draft of Body of Evidence that includes several things that got changed once they actually filmed the movie including: Madonna filming one of her lovemaking sessions with Willem Dafoe and using the tape to blackmail him. Frank Langella’s bisexuality being discovered during cross-examination of him, not during Madonna taking the stand. Anne Archer confronting Willem Dafoe in the parking garage after the trial, high on cocaine, yet giving him information that makes him realize that Madonna was guilty. There’s also a scene where Willem Dafoe(who was named Dulaney in this early draft) tries having rough sex with his wife and here’s the dialogue from that: It’s a full script, so it’s a long read, but for anyone interest in the process this story went through, it’s worth checking out.

I can't believe that I forgot to mention the Wachowski's Bound! 90s noir with lesbians and Joey Pants!

The one theater by my is doing a special tribute to "sound" at the end of the month for two weeks and one of the films they are showing is this. I promise if I am taken by this film on streaming I'll go see it in theaters at the end of the month.

This is Me! Cakebug! I've missed you all! Since I've been gone, walking a Tightrope of academia, I've had A Million Dreams about presenting a film which will help the forum Come Alive because, as I know, with this discerning crowd, too much is Never Enough. So let's Rewrite the Stars and realize that From Now On, you'll have a new guilty pleasure musical. Come with me to The Other Side. Ladies and Gents, This is the Moment You've Waited For... Hugh Jackman Whoa-oh-oh-oh!

While the perception of women as much "older" than their male counterparts despite being the same age is an ongoing problem, in these cases I think it's justified enough to cast a younger actress to play the part, as they also have to play the same character as a young mother raising a younger child in the early scenes, and then they are aged up with makeup later in the movie.

I mean, kind of yeah? Or I'll put it another way: if a movie isn't saying anything, then in my judgment it's lacking. The best films have something to say. Yes, even seemingly light entertainments like Star Wars. Now, it's entirely possible the movie doesn't intend to say anything about historical events and is instead a commentary on something else, but whatever else I can think of seems kind of muddled and inconsistent to me. Like the "floating like a feather" idea. It's nice, but do the events of the movie actually support it? There are several occasions where Forrest makes active choices: disobeying Lt. Dan and going back to save people, buying the shrimp boat, running across the country, etc., that result in further fame and fortune for him. He didn't completely float through life. So what is the movie saying here? If he truly did float through and got by on pure luck, that might amount to a consistent statement about life or humanity, but the movie keeps hedging its bets.

On the subject of house boats vs. float homes and why single ladies might be drawn to them. While it does seem that house boats in Portland are referred to as float homes in real estate listings the fact is that in all of my 10 years of living in Portland I only, ever, heard them referred to as house boats. When I was looking for a place to live after liberating myself from an unhappy marriage I seriously considered renting a HOUSE BOAT. Rent was often cheaper for a place floating on the river than comparable houses on land, a big plus for one surviving on restaurant wages such as I was. Also, I dreamt it would be freeing to feel the rush of the river beneath me, bringing the promise of strength and boundless possibility. But, alas, it wasn't to be because I was not childless and decided it would be too stressful to live in a house surrounded by water with a young child. So, I get you single ladies of the 80's and 90's.

Here's a deep cut that I'm not even sure holds up anymore. I use to love Duckman in which Tim Curry had a reoccurring role as King Chicken. To this day when I think of Tim Curry as many times as I've seen this movie I still think of "Bwahaha buck buck buck" Fun Tim Curry fact. He was the original Joker is Batman TAS. He was doing Captain Hook for Peter Pan animated Saturday cartoon so he was cast as the Joker on the new upcoming Batman cartoon. He got sick and the part had to be recast. Now to me Mark Hamill will always be my Joker but one can't help but wonder how he would have been with Tim Curry voicing him.

I agree with you, and everyone else, that it’s pretty straight down the middle. The only way I see it as a conservative film is in the fact that it’s not overtly anti-conservative. The thing with Forrest is that he’s essentially a tabla rasa - rarely commenting on the events themselves and leaving the viewer to interpret the things around him through the prism of their their own experiences. Like how you see the hippies as bumbling and the military guy as having a plan. I do feel like the hippies are a motley bunch, but I don’t see them as being particularly incompetent or anything. And I don’t see it as a conservative bias because in that moment, in my mind anyway, the movie is clearly casting the military guy as the person with ill intent and the protestors as well-meaning, albeit maybe out of their depth. Pretty much your standard establishment vs anti-establishment scenario. However, like you said, I can 100% see a pro-military conservative interpreting that scene oppositely. And I guess that’s a part of the general apathy regarding the movie. The movie doesn’t take sides because Forrest doesn’t take sides and this can make it feel kind of toothless. Everything is kind of presented without judgement. The military/government isn’t all evil. The hippies/protestors aren’t all good. They just kind of are. And if the movie doesn’t take a stand one way or the other, it can leave the viewer with a kind malaise of, “Okay, what’s the point?” It’s hard to be passionate when the Art presented is inherently passionless.

You're right, and I definitely didn't choose my words properly here. What I was really thinking about was all of these so-called counter-culture things in relation specifically to Jenny's arc. The surface level reading of the film's depiction is that Jenny's life kept getting worse and worse the more she delved into these parts of society, and she only found happiness when she took the more conservative woman's role of mother and wife. Now, I completely understand that this is just surface level and it's ignoring the context, which is that Jenny's life keeps getting worse because of her own self-destructive behavior stemming from her past as a victim of abuse, and doesn't actually have much to do with the individual aspects of counter-culture (besides maybe the drug use). But on the surface, it seems to suggest that the things Jenny did were a gateway to sadness. As far as the conservative aspects of the movie, right or wrong, I'm not the only one talking about it. Eric Kohn at IndieWire lambasted the film for its conservatism on its 25th anniversary: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/forrest-gump-bad-movie-25-anniversary-1202154214/ while the National Review celebrated the film as the 4th best conservative movie of all-time: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2009/02/23/best-conservative-movies/ My personal feeling is that the film plays it pretty straight down the middle, which then comes off as slightly conservative to me. In the particular case of the DC protest, I do disagree with the idea that the film is speaking out more against conservatives than liberals. The military guy seems to be the only one with a plan, while the protesters are totally bumbling. So while I see the military guy's action as childish and petty, I could easily imagine someone watching that scene and gleefully enjoying how the military guy was able to so easily troll the libs.

I haven’t listened to the episode yet, but I don’t know that this is entirely fair. I don’t think any of those groups are actually shown to be “bad.” How exactly are the protestors or the Black Panthers bad? And the only hippie to be shown in a negative light is her abusive boyfriend which I saw as just pointing out the hypocrisy of *some* hippies and not an indictment of the counterculture as a whole. In the DC protest scene, with the military guy ripping out the microphone jacks, the movie shows is speaking out more against conservatives than liberals. The movie also heavily frowns heavily, and repeatedly, upon segregation. And when it comes to Vietnam, the movie only ever celebrates the soldiers, not the war or the military. I also think it’s telling that the movie touches on six assassinations or assassination attempts, (Wallace, JFK, RFK, Lennon, Ford, and Reagan), but the only ones Gump discusses with any personal emotion are JFK, RFK, and Lennon. Of the others, the only one he even comments on at all is Wallace’s. I mean, I guess with the conservative figures, those were all just “attempts” and not successful assassinations, and maybe that makes a difference, but the movie definitely feels more sympathetic toward those with a liberal philosophy. However, it’s not above pointing out hypocrisy wherever it sees it.

I'm glad Paul ranted about how much the movie stretches credulity in all the events it depicts. Forrest is: 1. An All-American football star at Alabama. 2. A war hero who mooned the President during a medal ceremony with cameras everywhere. 3. A star ping-pong player who went to China and got sponsorship deals and went on Dick Cavett. 4. A millionaire shrimp company owner who also invested in Apple Computers. 5. A guy who ran across the country multiple times and garnered thousands of followers and constant media attention. And yet, everyone he talks to on that bench seems totally baffled about the stories he tells. None of the above broke through to them? And every time he gains more nationwide success, the news stories still just talk about him as some unknown guy we're just now learning about. Really, none of them looked any of this up? I get that this is supposed to be a fable about Americana or whatever, but it also involves real historical events so the discordance between that and the world of the film is jarring. If that's supposed to be some kind of satirical commentary on Americans and their short memories, then I don't think the film's tone carries that off well enough.

I think it's very well-made and well-acted pap, but ultimately it's pap. Doesn't really have much to say about anything, and in terms of story it has some really good sequences that have little to do with one another. Whenever it threatens to do some actual satirizing, there's a sentimental sequence right around the corner to disabuse you of that notion. I did read the book after seeing the movie and was surprised to find a much more sardonic and caustic tone, one that makes it much clearer to the reader that Forrest is more idiot than savant and that his success is an indictment of society. The book is definitely a satire of American culture and history. The movie is mixed messages all the way through. I didn't mind watching it again, but it's not listworthy. The acting is probably the most praiseworthy thing. I think all of the principals are quite good, but Robin Wright and Gary Sinise should be singled out for recognition (Sinise was nominated, Wright was not).