#25 Forrest Gump: Then ah met the President... again...

1994. dir Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn, Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, Sally Field.

Seen it before? Roughly half of it.

There's a scene in this movie where Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) has decided to run. No reason, just decided to run all over the country. He runs from Alabama to California to the Atlantic and back. People decide that he's inspired them, so they follow him. Then, in the middle of the desert, he just stops, because if he started running for no reason, why not stop for no reason? All the people who've joined him are confused and upset, I guess because they realized they followed some idiot out into the desert for no reason.

This scene pretty much summed up the whole movie for me.

This movie beat Pulp Fiction at the Oscars because people thought it was inspirational. What, exactly, could this have inspired them to do? Be incredibly, unbelievably lucky? Follow their dreams? Oh wait, Forrest Gump had no dreams. Every single thing he does in this movie is at somebody else's suggestion. Hey Forrest, play football! Join the army! Play ping-pong! (Assuming, that is, that he actually did any of those things. I was bored watching this and I came up with an alternate theory that Forrest Gump is an unreliable narrator, and he's cobbling together a life story that is 10% true, 70% stuff he saw on TV, and 20% stuff he just made up. Doesn't explain the magazine, though.)

This is just pointless Boomer nostalgia, with a totally uninteresting main character. I would liked to have seen Jenny's POV through the whole thing. She had lots of inner conflict and saw a seedier side of history. In fact I think that would have been a better movie, if she was the main character.

Position on the list: 39
Seriously: It beat Pulp Fiction. The Oscars are a joke.