I Hate Forrest Gump

It's been a dispiriting spring for this sports fan.  Sabotaged by some shady refereeing, my Cats were eliminated from the Big Dance by an eventual champion that simply should not have been eligible to compete. My sure bet Derby winner, Classic Empire, got knocked around out of the gate, and couldn't recover in time to finish any higher than fourth place.  And in the first-ever KSR Movie Bracket drama competition, the Big Blue Nation-- my people -- selected as winner the most overrated, disappointing film of my lifetime. At the risk of yet another pounding in the comments section below, let me state perhaps my most unpopular political opinion yet: I hate Forrest Gump. === I can vividly recall the excitement I felt watching the trailers. A dash of sports, a heaping of politics, and the promise of lots of laughs. The film was helmed by one of my favorite directors, Robert Zemeckis (I loved Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and starred my favorite actor not named Denzel or DeNiro.  Tom Hanks wasn't yet "America's Dad," but he had just transcended a successful comedy career with a courageous, multi-layered portrait of an AIDS patient in Philadelphia, justly earning him his first Best Actor Oscar. But Hanks' repeat victory the next year for Forrest Gump was an Academy embarrassment.  Not only did Morgan Freeman's rich and textured take on Red Redding in The Shawshank Redemption deserve the gold statue; Hanks' two-hour, one-note performance could have been accomplished by any high school drama student.  With the exception of Gary Sinese's colorful Lt. Dan, most of the rest of the cast was underwhelming as well. Robin Wright, so brilliant today as the steely, high-strung Claire Underwood on House of Cards, seemed miscast as the happy-go-lucky hippie Jenny Curran.  I found Bubba Blue to be cinema's most annoying sidekick since Jar Jar Binks, embodying all of the coastal elite's pernicious, patronizing stereotypes of small-town Southerners, so well torched by Matt Jones in his review of a recent Saturday Night Live skit. Despite its promising premise and impressive digital magic, Forrest Gump suffered from lazy plot construction. Zemeckis appeared to mine the last twenty pages of a high school U.S. history textbook, simply trying to figure out clever ways to insert his lead character into all of the main events. (A device much more effectively accomplished by Woody Allen a decade earlier in Zelig.)  It was fun at first, but the pattern was so predictable that halfway through, I was just waiting to see which character would be diagnosed with AIDS.  (To make matters worse, unlike the brave treatment by Hanks and crew in Philadelphia, the disease wasn't even specifically named.) The movie's most ruinous legacy, though, is the generation of much-lesser imitators it spawned. I'm referring to the spate of treacly rom coms-- take Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, Mothers' Day and Valentine's Day for the worst examples -- which gather a similar assortment of one-dimensional boilerplate characters, and force them into artificial "moments" that are supposed to make our hearts swell or our tear ducts fill.  I'm left dry eyed wanting my ninety minutes back. Now, contrast Forrest Gump to the film that it slayed in the championship round of the KSR Movie Bracket, a repeat of the epic Best Movie battle at the 1995 Academy Awards.  Pulp Fiction is a two-and-a-half hour breathtaking joy ride, filled with as much intense, heart-pumping adrenaline as the needle Eric Stolz thrusts into Uma Thurman's chest in Act Three.  The acting is exhilarating: from John Travolta's career-rehabilitating role as Vincent Vega, to Christopher Walken's memorable brief turn as Captain Koons, to my favorite, Samuel L. Jackson's epochal portrayal of Jules Winnfield. Best of all is Quentin Tarantino's peak-of-career screenwriting.  Compare Mama Gump's hackneyed sloganeering to the brilliant and hilarious "filler" dialogue between Vincent and Jules on subjects ranging from Quarter Pounders in Paris to the sexuality of foot massages.  Now name a scene in Gump -- or any other film for that matter -- as tautly thrilling and emotionally potent as the apartment confrontation that culminates in Jules' bone-chilling recitation of Ezekiel 25:17. Checkmate. Now, fair readers, I don't blame this travesty of cinematic justice on you. This election was rigged. Forrest Gump was the Duke of the brackets, getting a clear ride to the Final Four, with only one excellent film, the erratic Saving Private Ryan, in its way.  The far superior Schindler's List played the role of Kentucky, forced in the Sweet 16 to compete with the most talented film in the tournament, Goodfellas.  Further, by artificially limiting the contestants to the post-1980 era -- hey guys, some of us were alive in the 70s -- the contest unfairly omitted the two greatest films of the modern era. (Hint: They both have "Godfather" in their titles.) Worst of all, I call foul on the most blatant contest-fixing outside of Russian hacking and John Higgins-whistling.  Witness this tweet from championship eve:

Well I'll be looking for a new job if Forrest Gump loses today. https://t.co/CvOvsug9wc

– Drew Franklin (@DrewFranklinKSR) May 5, 2017

This election tampering was worse than the Comey letter and Podesta leaks combined: As Matt will be first to admit, Drew is the soul, or at least the belly laugh, of this operation. KSR surely wouldn't be the same without him.  At a minimum, without Drew, we would have never experienced this one shining moment of UK fandom. So, I am willing to accept a loss here for the sake of the team.  But if anybody undermines a Caddyshack victory in the upcoming comedy movie bracket competition, count on me to go all Ezekiel on them. === Postscript:  I do give credit to Forrest Gump for providing me with my favorite Hollywood encounter.  I was hanging out at some sort of political event, when I spotted one of my favorite actors, Forest Whitaker, walking by with a small entourage.  I approached him to try to get a picture, but he appeared to sprint away, hurried along by his team to make an interview (or escape this interloper.) My feelings slightly hurt, I yelled "Run, Forest, Run!"  It was my finest hour.