Forrest Gump: Love it or Hate it?

St. Widge said

:17:

One of the worst pieces of fluff propaganda anyone has ever made. It's incidious in it's stupidity. It implies that "be nice" is all you need to be successful in life and devalues education and intelligence. Beyond that, Tom Hanks makes any movie worse than it could have been and this one was going to be bad either way.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if people didn't keep quoting lines from it like they were sage advice. I mean, "stupid is as stupid does", what does that even mean? Stupid people act stupid. Really? I had no idea.

Click to expand...

I slightly disagree. If you think of the Gump character as a metaphor for America, combine that with the settings and events, the theme of the movie is revealed: that America in that period of time was a bumbling, stumbling idiot that eventually lucked into getting things right, somehow surviving where it was ill equipped to do so. And it was wildly successful through no real talent of its own but through happenstance.

I don't think that is quite the hack job you portray it as, but it disgusts me for other reasons. It's totally a skewed baby boomer manifesto born from their bloated sense of themselves and erroneous morality. It's an attempt to process the guilt they feel from abandoning their own political agenda when they turned into yuppies.

So I agree that is fairly repugnant. I'm weary of that generation's fascination with itself.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy some parts of it. I still say "Lieutenant Dan, ice cream!!! Ice cream, Lieutenant Dan!!" all the time. I also say "little bit of stinging-rain..." sometimes. They just worked their way into my lexicon somehow.