This isn’t a contest, man. What gets me is that, even after people have written thoughtful interpretations of the movie, pointing out several points of view that may not have occurred to other viewers, you still have people posting that it was (for example) a “glurgefest”. I mean, that’s frustrating because it’s just objectively wrong. The movie was no glurgefest. It showed life as a decidedly mixed bag of awful shit, sometimes mitigated by an occasional good thing that happens (shortly followed by more awful shit). It shows that even the good things in life 1) almost never happen the way you think they’re going to happen, and 2) require shitloads of work and sacrifice, and then end up being more a product of random chance than anything you intended.
I mean, that’s what the movie was about, in large part. FG loses almost everything he has ever valued, and then ends up being saddled with a kid he is desperately underqualified to raise in the end. That he ends up thankful for the kid in no way means that the movie was glurgey. Far from it. It’s just a natural extrapolation of FG’s character.
You’re exactly the type who’ll say “Oh look, a sweet little precious baby seal!” even while it’s eating your family and afterwards you’ll make excuses: “Imagine how many of its own relatives have been harpooned or wound up as oil or some rich woman’s coat!” Well when it comes to it and the ice caps melt and the baby seals are in your neighborhood and hungry and pissed, I hope you don’t expect the rest of us to come save you!
Sorry, but it’s a touchy subject with me. A baby seal killed my pa.
As for Forrest Gump, don’t love it, don’t hate it, will watch parts of it on TV from time to time but don’t own it on DVD, loved the soundtrack. Main thing I dislike about it is the theft from Zelig.
If someone claims that “Hamlet” is an allegory about the Cold War, they are objectively wrong. Or that they didn’t like “Huckleberry Finn” because Mark Twain hated niggers.
So if the claim is “The message of *Forrest Gump *is the key to success is being retarded”, well, what do they have to support that? I mean, we can see what’s on the screen. We know how we feel when watching the movie. But to go from that to a declaration of what the filmmakers must have intended requires a bit more humility. It requires a bit more than “Dude, it just is, that’s what some guy I hate says it was about, and he liked it, so that means I should hate it”.
Or maybe that guy you hate was an idiot who had no justification for claiming that being retarded is the key to success, and you’d be just as big an idiot if you believed him. It’s no so much that particular interpretations can be shown to be objectively correct, but that other interpretations can be shown to be objectively wrong. Forrest Gump isn’t about how great it is to be a retard. That’s an objectively wrong interpretation.
On the other hand, if you didn’t like Forrest Gump because you were bored watching it and you don’t like Tom Hanks, well, that’s how you felt. You don’t have to justify that you were bored watching the movie. It’s your prerogative to dislike a movie simply because you weren’t entertained while watching it.
It’s also perfectly fine to hate a movie because you disagree with the politics of the movie. But if you hate the movie because you hate the message of the movie, it seems to me you should have some justification for your belief as to what the message of the movie really was. And if you can’t do that, if you just pulled the supposed message that you hated out of your ass, well, your dislike of the movie is unjustified. Not that you’re wrong to hate the movie, just that your stated reason for hating the movie doesn’t justify your hate for the movie. And you know, your interpretation might even be correct, just because you weren’t able to justify your interpretation doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But if we’re, you know, discussing the movie, and someone can’t articulate why they didn’t like it beyond “it sucked”, then why are they bothering to talk about it?
Not exactly what I was saying there. You could very well understand the movie and not like it. I mean, different stroke for different folks. You could understand it perfect and find it a ‘glurgefest’. However, a lot of people in this thread seemingly didn’t understand the movie, so I was just pointing out that it’s not surprising that there is so much dislike since they obviously didn’t get the point. If you did and still didn’t like it then that’s fine by me. As in many things, some folks like a given movie or book, and some folks don’t…and vice versa.
That would be a reasonable reason not to like it, if you don’t like luck playing a major factor in stuff.
It’s not at all a silly line. It does, of course, predicate itself on the idea that the interpretation in question is one honestly arrived at, and not manufactured specifically for the purpose of creating a ridiculous example.
No, I don’t think I would do that. If you read Grapes of Wrath, and you honestly, truly, felt that was the message of the book, then you aren’t “wrong” for feeling that. I’d certainly be interested seeing how you arrived at that conclusion, because it’s a pretty unusual take on the novel.
I thought it was schmaltzy, but that doesn’t mean nothing sad ever happens, just that even the sad things were shown in a schmaltzy way.
I don’t think he ended up with a horrible life either - loads of money, excellent health, a son he thought he’d never have, the knowledge that the love of his life did care for him, and still young enough to meet a new love and make new friends. That’s a hell of a lot better than most people manage, especially people born poor and disabled and in a a generation with conscription. You keep stating it as fact that his life was terrible in the end, but that’s a matter of interpretation.
You reckon the movie’s message is ‘life is random and you can’t affect your chances of happiness by anything you do’ and you consider that a plus point?
I’m not trying to “win” anything here. I’m not even trying to defend a particular interpretation of the film - it’s been way too long since I’ve seen it to be able to that honestly or accurately. But there’s a strong defensive streak among the film’s defenders in this thread, which tends to be highly dismissive of countering interpretations simply because they’re critical of the film. astorian said that the films detractors were “fanboys” of Pulp Fiction and Shawshank Redemption. FoieGrasisEvil dismissed the films critics as “bitter and cynical.” Lemur’s Star Wars snark infantilized criticism of the film. And I’m not really sure what Cisco’s trying to say anymore, but he’s certainly being very emphatic about it. And, of course, there’s this:
Because, you know, it can’t be that some people don’t find your interpretation convincing. No, it must be some species of willful ignorance that’s keeping people from agreeing with you. Because you’re objectively right when you say this movie isn’t glurgey. :rolleyes:
I’m going to use the definition of “glurge” provided by Snopes.com for this - which is fitting, as that’s where the term originated:
In what way does Forrest Gump objectively fail to meet that definition?
If there are plenty of alternate interpretations (with a logical basis) that you don’t hate, yet you still stick to your interpretation (with a possible dubious logical basis) so that you can keep hating it…well the hate is on you my friend.
Yeah, its possible your interpretation is the ONLY correct one, but chances are you are wrong.
Besides, if your reason to hate a movie is mainly the “interpretation” …well thats just all kinds of Gump level sillyness right there.
I’m not a fan or hater of the movie. If it happens to be on TV, I’ll watch a few minutes of it. I found it sweet that Forrest met up with his black counterpart in the Army. Was it too precious? Yes. Could you predict,that Bubba was going to die before everything was said and done? Yeah. But still, my heart tugs when Bubba says to Forrest, “I wanna go hoooome.” Poor Bubba.
I like when Forrest goes all crazy and just takes off running across the country. Was it just a platform to showcase post-war 70s culture? Yep. Was it totally unrealistic and over-the-top, the soundtrack crammed with as many 70s rock songs as you can imagine? You betcha. But there’s something about running across country aimlessly like that which appeals to me. Forrest needed to defrag and that was his way.
Things I didn’t like:
Jen-nay. I found their on/off relationship tiresome and creepy after awhile. Him obssessing over her, her constantly using and leaving him. I had more pity for Jenny than I did for Forrest sometimes, and yet there was no good luck in her life like there was for him. Yes, she had a chance to stay with Forrest and be his loving wife forever and forever, but even then she saw it as something too good to be true. Maybe she knew her love for Forrest wasn’t real…or she was just so wrecked inside that she didn’t think she deserved the “good” life he was offering her. Regardless of the source of her inner turmoil–which we aren’t given a glimpse into because the movie is narrated by Forrest–she’s convienently punished with AIDS. That sucks. They could have at least had her get hit by a bus or something. And then our hearts are yanked when Forrest is sobbing at her grave. I feel pity for him, but I’m also like, “Hey, now is your chance to meet someone who is in your league. You can stop being the creepy stalker!”
Forrest’s voice. It just grated after awhile. The Forrest in the book doesn’t “sound” quite so…retarded. They played up his stupidity for laughs, I think. Don’t like that.
Other than that, I don’t see the movie as something to get all that up in a tizzy over. I wasn’t impressed with Tom Hanks’ acting, but I’m not surprised he won an Oscar for it. Those type of roles usually have “Oscar” written all over it. The movie is cloyingly sweet and maudlin and trite…but it’s not ALL bad. Sometimes you make a movie worse than it is by over-thinking it. Some movies call for serious critical analysis. Others are best enjoyed with the heart more so than the brain. The best movies get at both organs. Just because Forrest Gump doesn’t meet that requirement doesn’t make it a horrible movie.
You’re better than this. At no point did I say anything about “willful ignorance.” That’s your invention, and you made it up out of nothing.
I AM objectively right, because the movie is NOT glurgey at all. It sometimes masquerades as glurge, and it’s kind of darkly funny that people seem to want to characterize it as such. They remember “Jen-Nay” and “Life is like a box of chocolates” and the other things which are sappy expressly to highlight FG’s simplistic outlook on life, and never seem to want to acknowledge that the theme of the movie was much, much darker and more nihilistic and layered than, for instance, Pulp Fiction. I mean, PF was all about making moral choices and redemption. Forrest Gump was more about getting fucked, no matter what, and if you experience any happiness in life, it’s pretty much a product of your own attitude and dumb luck, not anything you actually planned for.
Seriously? It seems fairly obvious to me that what they mean is that glurge “conceals much darker meanings” unintentionally, that the writers of most churchy, “uplifting” glurge are sincere in their intent to show the power of miracles or whatever. The darkness in the glurge usually comes from the myopic moral viewpoint espoused, not from any intentional layering of subtle thematic elements. Therefore, I submit that Forrest Gump does not qualify as glurge precisely because any uplifting morality tale in the movie is systematically subverted and rejected, entirely on purpose, leaving the movie with a decidedly unglurgey theme.
There is a difference between an artists intent in creating a work, and the meaning an audience derives from said work. Intent is, at least in theory, objectively knowable. Meaning, on the other hand, is purely subjective. What the artist meant to say is not always going to be what the audience hears. Shakespeare certainly did not intend to convey any message about the Cold War when he wrote Hamlet. This does not make one incorrect if he reads Hamlet, and feels that it conveys a message that is relevant to the Cold War.
As a general rule, I don’t put much stock in the artist’s intent. It can be interesting, from a biographic point of view, but from an artistic point of view, it’s entirely irrelevant. That’s just a personal preference, mind you: if you think artist intent is important to understanding a work, that’s entirely valid. I just don’t find it very rewarding.
I think this is somewhat of a strawman. People brought up the cultural context in which the film was being discussed when it was released, which is an entirely valid frame of reference when discussing a work of art.
Why? Because the OP specifically asked people who disliked the movie to share their reasons for disliking the movie. Remember, this thread, as formulated by the OP, is not a general discussion of the merits and flaws of Forest Gump. It’s a specific invitation to people who disliked the movie to talk about why they disliked it.
Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see a movie I hate, I generally don’t watch it a second time. And this movie is over fifteen years old. I suspect a significant percentage of the people who hated the film haven’t seen it in a good ten years. Which makes it difficult, at best, to offer a detailed exegesis of the films flaws. It’s been so long since I’ve seen it that I really can’t offer a better reason for not liking the film than, “It sucked,” because that’s the principal thing I remember about my experience in watching the film.
Yeah that’s what I didn’t like about the movie. He wasn’t a handicapped person who achieved something important through hard work or luck. As you say, he did everything. It was absurd. I assume it was supposed to funny. But it wasn’t. It was overdone.
In addition, it was presented in a sappy and corny way. My example was the scene where the leg braces break off. That wasn’t sappy and corny? Really?
You think too highly of Forrest Gump and too lowly of me. The concept of a handicapped person being unexpectedly capable is hardly new. Looking to Ancient Greece we have examples like the blind prophet Tiresias, or the blind poet Homer (who might have been real). They even had a lame god Hephaestus.
Robert Louis Stevenson based the character Long John Silver on of a friend of his who also needed a crutch to walk. Stevenson found it interesting that his friend could be such a powerful figure despite his handicap. Silver, despite his handicap, is the most dangerous and capable character in Treasure Island.
There are, of course, real life examples as well. FDR and Steven Hawking come to mind.
Forrest was involved in so many different events that it was hard to take the film seriously. Which is fine, because the film definitely was supposed to have a humorous element to it. However, Forrest Gump wasn’t a great movie because, overall, the humor was rather bad in Forrest Gump. Half of the Jokes are “Look it’s (insert reference to pop culture/history here)!” The film fails to make any decent jokes about those references. The other half of the humor in the movie was “Let’s laugh at the retarded guy for doing something stupid!” These weren’t done particularly well either, as Forrest’s mental abilities seemed to vacillate wildly.
I do not see any other way to understand this part of your previous quote:
I’m not trying to be aggressive, here, or a jerk, or play any games. That appears to be precisely what you are saying, and I don’t see any way to get any other meaning out of those words. I don’t see any ambiguity that would allow for a different interpretation. You say that people have written thoughtful defenses of the movie, which is true. You point out that other posters have maintained their negative interpretations. And then you say that those people are objectively wrong for not changing their mind about the movie. If someone has posted something objectively true, and other people ignore it and cling to their original, contrary ideas, how is that not willful ignorance?
But that’s entirely - entirely - a subjective interpretation. It literally cannot be anything other than a subjective interpretation, unless the movie is actually flashing the words, “We’re being ironic now!” on the screen during those scenes, because you’re describing the film’s subtext. Subtext, by definition, is not directly stated in a work of art, but must be inferred. It exists, not within the work itself, but in the gestalt created in the mind of the observer by the interplay of the work’s objective elements.
For the record, I didn’t say that everyone (or even most people) who hated ForrestGump are bitter fanboys who liked Pulp Fiction and Shawshank Redemption.
People like or dislike films for all kinds of reasons. There are BOUND to be people who didn’t like Forrest Gump, and that doesn’t bother me in the least (I myself gave it only 3 stars out of 4, a thumbs-up but not way up).
But the OP asked why so many people seem to hate the movie so much. My take is, there AREN’T that many people who loathe the movie, but the people who DO loathe it are precisely the types who post regularly on movie-themed websites, and a lot of them ARE bitter precisely because ***Gump ***won out over two movies with a devoted cult of fans.
There are all kinds of valid reasons someone might not have liked*** Dances With ***Wolves, but if I encounter someone who’s STILL furious about that film winning the Oscar after 20 years, I can usually be pretty sure that person is a Scorsese fanatic who really wanted ***Goodfellas ***(a very good film in its own right) to win.
LOTS of movies I didn’t like have won the Oscar. A few that I HATED have won the Oscar. But ten minutes after the Oscar telecast is over, I’ve usually forgotten about the monumental injustice I’ve just witnessed. Most grownups do.
When people like or dislike a film, they usually have excellent reasons, When they worship or detest a film (especially one they haven’t seen in a decade), I’ve found that there are usually reasons that have NOTHING to do with the virtues or flaws of the film itself.
This conversation is ri-goddamn-diculous. Nobody cares if you don’t like Forrest Gump; the issue is people not liking it for bogus interpretations. Sorry, Mills, but we’re going to have to agree to disagree that there’s no such thing as an objectively wrong interpretation of a piece. Yes there is. If you’re going to tell me that Jane Eyre is a metaphor for the futility of the Cold War, you’re wrong.
Okay: I didn’t like Forrest Gump because it was boring, Tom Hanks’s performance was mediocre, and too much of the humor relied on pop culture references.
Ri-goddamn-diculous: I didn’t like Forrest Gump because the point of the movie was if you’re a lucky retard, you’ll be happy.
Seriously? It seems fairly obvious to me that what they mean is that glurge “conceals much darker meanings” unintentionally, that the writers of most churchy, “uplifting” glurge are sincere in their intent to show the power of miracles or whatever. The darkness in the glurge usually comes from the myopic moral viewpoint espoused, not from any intentional layering of subtle thematic elements. Therefore, I submit that Forrest Gump does not qualify as glurge precisely because any uplifting morality tale in the movie is systematically subverted and rejected, entirely on purpose, leaving the movie with a decidedly unglurgey theme.