Why I liked Forrest Gump! Anyone agree? What about those who Disagree?

Cafe Society
21

I found it manipulative and smarmy. Jenny becomes a hippie–free love and drug use lead to her punishment of sickness and death. A conservative’s wet dream. IMHO.

No really, I know there’s more to the movie than that, and I do like Tom Hanks in the role. He made the character seem real and sympathetic. I just can’t get past the heavy-handed MESSAGE I see in the Jenny character. Cool soundtrack, though.

I also find it interesting how polarizing this movie is. Among my acquaintances I’ve observed a love it/hate it phenomenon.

22

I enjoyed it immensely when I saw it, and I think the primary reason for that was that I knew nothing about it at the time. All I knew was that Tom Hanks was in it and someone else in the dorm said it was good. The voice, the fact that he was slow, the historical bits…it all came as a complete surprise to me.

If I had seen it after it had been hyped, marketed, parodied, and quoted to death, I don’t believe I would have enjoyed it nearly so much.

Dr. J

23

I didn’t like it not because of any plot or character issues. I didn’t like it because it had aspirations of being a deep, emotional, life-changing film and it wasn’t. At all.

Robert Zemekis (the director) made the Back to the Future movies and Roger Rabbit. Great entertainment yes, but hardly Oscar® material. Forrest Gump was no different. It was just a light, silly, uneven, forgettable, TV-movie type film. That it won Best Picture and he Best Director was laughable.

24

I thought it was a good movie. I thought the scene where Forrest meets his son and asks Jenny if he is “smart” or something like that was moving. I guess I am just a low-brow mother fixated smarmy kind of guy. Maybe someday I can grow up to be all sophisticated and intellectual, and then I will see what an evil and horrible conservative wet-dream Forrest Gump really is.

25

I agree with Clark K’s assessment of it.

I really like the movie. I didn’t really understand it when I first saw it (gee, I must have been…ten or something…I don’t recall) but I got the basic gist of it and I really liked Forrest. And HATED Jenny. I still don’t like her character at all. growl I think the appeal for me was how he kept bouncing from place to place.

Good one, Rhum Runner. :stuck_out_tongue:

26

Silly me! I read the OP to mean, “I liked Forrest Gump. Did you like it or dislike it? Why?” Apparently, according to our friend, ratty, the OP really meant “I hated Forrest Gump, and here’s why you’re dumb for not feeling the same way”.
I rather enjoyed the movie (the novel was funnier, in a laugh-out-loud sort of way), but I won’t tell anyone who didn’t like it that they’re stupid. Last time I checked, we were all entitled to our own opinions. :slight_smile:

27

I thought Forest Gump was a pretty damn good film! And I have to question the sanity/conscious freedom of people who didn’t. Especially people who didn’t like it because stuff happened to Gump without much of his control - that was the main point of the film! It was deliberate.

Whatever, I don’t care, I just liked it. I enjoyed it, I did not analize it in anyway. I don’t watch films to say “well It was bad for this reason and that reason and the other reason” I watch them to say “well I enjoyed that, it was entertaining” or to say “That was boring, It didn’t entertain me”

28

Sorry if I came off a little harse. It isn’t a terrible film. I just can’t help wanting to fuel a backlash against all the immense praise it got.

I saw it the day it came out. I had absolutely no idea what it was about (I was going with someone who wanted to see it). After seeing it I felt it was an alright little Tom Hanks vehicle. The SFX scenes were very well done, but a little gimicky and sterile. Not my kind of movie, but whatever.

Then a few weeks later when I heard people were going nuts over it, and seeing it again & again, and it was getting four star reviews, and it was in the top ten highest grossing of all time and nominated for a bazillion Oscars, I went “Huh?!?”

No it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. And I can’t help feeling that it was kind of a ‘poser’. The script tried to be deep and meaningful and it failed. It was just superficial and schmaltzy.

29

The things that bother me are the descriptions of Gump and his “disability”. It seams as though my opinion of the mentally disabled is extremely differences than most people on these boards. Is it wishful thinking that there’s really nothing wrong with the people that Forrest’s character (exaggeratingly) represents? Probably. I really like to think wall all have out place in this world, and that no one, as a whole, out does each other in importance.

I just hear a lot of words used to describe the characters:

“Stupid”, “dumb as horseshit”, and other’s in other post.

Is this your opinion about the mentally disabled in general? Or just Forrest Gump?

I happened to wonder if some people of the Straight Dope message boards, (some of the most intelligent people, to whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to), don’t like the idea of a story about someone that ‘different’ then themselves, making it big. As if to shows that being smarts doesn’t or shouldn’t make a difference. If this opinion is WAY off than feel free to shit all over it and explain why it isn’t. I’m just throwing it out there, I’m not saying it’s true. It’s just that if you’re speaking on behalf all people with mental retardation, it sounds as if you’ve matured little since high school. I don’t know anyone in my personal life that would refer to even the movies character that way. Please clarify to me your choice of words. Don’t mean to be pandering PC bullshit.

If you don’t like the movie because it’s unrealistically saying this man could get as far as he did, that’s fine! Although most movies are unrealistic in that sort of way, even though most of the characters are “every-day ‘Joe’s”, and not people of a low IQ.

As For Gump’s girl, Jenny… I agree she sucked. BUT consider this fist. We, (and Forrest), learn of her illness AFTER her and Forrest reunite. We have no idea if she learned after or before Gump’s invitation to come visit her. Perhaps she was just informed about it. Are we sure she knew of the illnesses severity before she told Forrest about? I also don’t know if she thought it was best for Forrest to know about their child. It may have been a bad decision, but I don’t think she knew it was until later.

I don’t think Jenny KNEW Forrest loved her, like she said in the picture: “You know what ‘love’ is”. I think a lot of the reason she didn’t believe he loved her was because she didn’t understand how anyone could. But this gal was the only person that befriended Forrest in his younger years. She stuck by him all through high school. I’m sure there were sacrifices she made that would come of that friendship. I think Forrest knew the woman she was because of the childhood years they spent together. As she started to change, Gump didn’t. She lost her innocents that Gump knew were there.

30

I feel like I need to explain myself here. I came across as sounding pretty harsh in my posts, and I apologize.

What I meant about the ‘Bosom Buddies’ comment: I just think that Tom Hanks has been representing himself as some sort of spokesbeing for all these worthy causes, and yet he’s just an actor- he knows no more about astronauts or World War II than anybody else, and his opinions should not count for more just because he’s famous or has been in some of these movies. I was joking when I brought up ‘Bosom Buddies’, but it came off poorly. I’m sorry.

To address another issue: someone has implied that I have something against people who are retarded. I take offense at this, since it is simply not true. I dislike ‘Forrest Gump’ because it seems to me that the movie was trying to portray Forrest as some sort of inspirational person * simply because he was retarded*. This strikes me as patronizing and disingenuous, and I just plain don’t like it. I find it offensive when people speak about the disabled as being somehow heroic just for being alive- they are only human beings, the same as you and I, and their disability is not cause for pandering or heart-warming stories about how they ‘beat the odds.’

And yes, I think the movie was extremely heavy-handed. Some movies have no message and are made simply to entertain. Some movies practically smack you in the face trying to get their message across, and for me, ‘Forrest Gump’ falls into this category. If you show me a movie with a message, I’m going to analyze and comment on what I thought that message was. Don’t try to hide behind “But it was just for entertainment!” when the movie was clearly trying to make many comments on many different topics.

I agree that ‘Pulp Fiction’ got ripped off at the Oscars. It wasn’t as great a film as some say, but it was definitely better than ‘Forrest Gump’.

31

Not to mention the placement of the movies character in dated pictures had already been done in “Zelig”.

32

Ratty, I would just like to go on record to say I was wrong about you.

I just didn’t understand why some people were a little “blunt” on the CHARACTER of Gump. Where people could be saying “a movie about a dumb shit who is glorified, and yadda, yadda, yadda”. It’s just made me think, are they calling him a dumb shit because of his disability… if so, is that how they speak of the mentally handicapped in real life? Or is he just a “dumb shit” because that’s what the movie made him out to be.

And It’s not you Ratty, I figured some weren’t trying to be “derogatory”, and you happened to be one that wasn’t. I just hear a lot of then when people are referring to the movie. Not just on this thread, but in these boards. I probably just took it the wrong way and am over sensitive about that particular issue.

33

Gosh, I really enjoyed the movie. And I have to admit I don’t understand most criticism of it; to use the classic movie critic’s line, I wonder if the movie isn’t commonly misunderstood.

The movie was wonderfully written, acted, and shot. But I didn’t see it as a comedy about a dumb guy; comparing this film to “Dumb and Dumber” is like comparing “The Miracle Worker” to “Hollywood Ending.” MY read of the movie is that the stories of Forrest and Jenny were two sides of a metaphor for post-WWII American history. The fact that Forrest isn’t very bright and tends to accidentally accomplish things isn’t, that I can see, the central point of the film, and I don’t see Jenny’s death as being a moral statement, either. The point of the film is to tell the story of the United States from the early 1950s up until today, and uses Forrest and Jenny as the twin personifications of America.

34

Even without having seen the movie, I think this is the problem. If Forrest and Jenny represent different (‘twin’ is clearly the wrong word) personifications of post-WWII America, it’s going to be hard to avoid comparing them and their outcomes, and reaching some value judgments as a result. (Whether Groom or Zemeckis intended the audience to come to certain conclusions, I don’t know.) As Proudest Monkey said:

At least one prominent conservative, Cal Thomas, drew exactly that lesson from the movie. His “Gump tells it like it is: The Sixties were bad, and The Fifties were good” column removed any desire I had to see Gump.

35

He must have been watching a different film. The movie’s only real reference to the past is Forrest’s own first name - which he does not realize comes from the founder of the KKK, although he inadvertently refers to it.

(Shrug) I just did not get that message out of it. Forrest as a child is portrayed as being exploited and teased mercilessly. It’s very clearly demonstrated in the film that part of Jenny’s personal issues are rooted in her being sexually abused by her father, in the 50’s. It didn’t look like a barrel of laughs to me.

36

I liked it. I know I probably shouldn’t- but I liked it-- and every time I see it, I still like it. I think it’s Tom Hanks performance that did it. But then I look at the strength of the supporting actors. Or the special effects. Or the script. In the end, it is the combination of things that does it for me.

But that is why they call it taste.

BTW-- the house he had was something.

37

Well, gee whiz, what a shame it is when conservatism and reality happen to coincide. A liberal’s worst nightmare.

As for the movie…it’s OK, but not what I’d expect from an Oscar winner. Even in its own “genre” of “ordinary person as accidental maker of history”, I’d say I liked “Dick” better. It was funnier, more focused, had a better soundtrack, and the protagonists were mostly active rather than mostly passive, like Gump. And I don’t think “Dick” was on anyone’s Oscar nominee list in its year…not even as the longest of long shots.

38

I think those who get mad at teh Jenny Character missed the point. She is not a demonstration of what happens to bad people nor is she intentionally cruel.

She is a messed up person that was unable to have any normal relationships due to the abusive nature of her relationship with her father. She like Gump drifted from place to place (You know showing the flipside, paralleling Gumps Narrative fairtale trip with her trip into hell) Where Gump was lucky to find those who would befriend him she found the manipulators and users.

It wasn’t until she became pregnant that she became self reliant and perhaps realized the mistakes she had made. She knew she was dying and the only person she could trust to take care of her kid (who saw dead people), and it turned out to be the father. Notice when Gump sees her she has a job and a house. She was finally getting her life together.

Why did she treat Gump the way she did? What would you do in her place. This simple man who you’ve known all your life says he loves you. You think he is just simple and confused. You don’t believe he can feel that way. So she turns him down. Her final exit (1976) was not to abbandon him to resume her ways but to finally come to grips with herself.

NYAA!

39

I hated, hated, hated this movie. The fact that it was so popular says something very disturbing about the American public.

It’s a movie that gives the viewer permission to be apathetic and uninvolved; it justifies the life of the non-voting couchpotato, and I think it’s a sickening–if ultimately, cynically, accurate–representation of the modern American.

40

I really didn’t like this movie. On the surface it’s all sweetness and inspiration, till you look to the real message…

Keep your head down and do as the bossman say, never question authoriy or what you’ve been told is right=sucess & fortune!
Question authority, try to find your own way = Get AIDS and die!

Ew.