When this great movie was released in the summer of 1994 I originally thought that it was going to be mostly a comedy. When I saw it, I knew that this movie was not only going to win the Academy Award for best picture and it was far more than just a comedy; this was a great drama that had moments of tremendous emotion unprecedented in my movie-going experience even to this day. Tom Hanks won for best actor for the second year in a row, having already won the previous year for Philadelphia about a gay man who was dying of AIDS. This picture also won for best director for Robert Zemeckis  and best screenplay for Eric Roth , which represents the top four for all awards given by the Academy of Motion Pictures.

Probably the greatest parts of this movie include the empathy that you gain over the two hours for Forrest Gump who is mildly retarded and has physical problems with this legs that he eventually overcame. Despite Forrest’s mental disabilities he was able to go to college on a Football scholarship and excel as a running back and then inexplicably volunteered for the Vietnam War. During the movie, several flashbacks, where Forrest met President Kennedy and other famous people in history were shown that provided a humorous and different dimension to the film that I have never seen in any movie. Additionally, the empathy you feel for Forrest include his difficulty in making his childhood girlfriend his wife mainly because of his mental disabilities and her very bad childhood and as a result her dangerous lifestyle as a “flower child” . Forrest chasing Jenny is the central plot of the story and is the source of the best emotional scenes most especially the ending which was almost impossible to sit through.

In all my years of watching movies I have never had a worse experience as far as an emotional overload at the end of a movie, with the possible exception of “Terms of Endearment” , which came out in 1983. For those who have not seen this movie after almost 22 years, I will try to not give anything away, but there is a devastating death at the end that is unbearable to watch and the barometer I always use to measure any movie is audience reaction. At the end of this movie in the theater I was in, there was not a dry eye anywhere. The music, the emotion of the actors and at the very end a floating feather, which was symbolic of life was extremely well done but just made the whole ending so difficult to get through.

When it was all over,   I remember having great difficulty getting out of the theater when it was time to leave at first because of the crowd and then because of seeing the emotional devastation in the eyes of so many people in the crowd. I also remember driving home being especially difficult because of the emotional roller coaster I had just experienced.

I have not seen Forrest Gump too many times after I saw it in July 1994 mainly because of the ending, but for those after 22 years who have not seen it, you owe it to yourself to see it at least one time, because you will never forget the experience.

Forrest Gump – IMDB

This is probably the most unusual movie about war ever made. There are very few scenes of war action in this movie and instead the entire 2 hours was about one thing: what is war really all about. Is it about the young 19 year old kid that gets killed because he was too poor to go to college or have a friend in a high place who can sign a form and get him out of a tour in Vietnam or IRAQ, or is it about the people who make the high level decisions that decide whether an innocent child or innocent people die in order to attain a higher goal and maybe save lives in the future by preventing a suicide bomber or terrorist attack. What we all agree on is that war is always the worst of humanity and war is hell .

We all know that war is no longer what it was in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam war. Now we have billion dollar drone planes that fly all day long unmanned and can take pictures of the enemy and at any given moment can blow up a building a road or a group of terrorists. The movie Eye in the Sky is about this new war and the decisions that are made that might save lives or could take innocent lives and the reality is that in our current dangerous world these decisions have to be made every day.

This movie did an excellent job in showing how difficult decisions like this are to make, so difficult that in about 10 different circumstances the officials involved did not want to make the life and death choices necessary and passed the ultimate decision to someone else. The major dilemma in this movie was the potential opportunity lost of blowing up a building to kill several suicide bombers before they could kill many people in a shopping mall or maybe kill a small child who was right outside of the building selling bread. The acronym CDE is used quite a bit in this movie and it stands for Collateral Damage Estimate and its this number which is given as a percentage that complicates the decision on whether to blow up the building populated with several North African terrorists and the military accepted risk of killing innocent bystanders.

Most of this movie is about 5 groups of people in different locations all watching and identifying terrorists through the use of a drone in the sky and amazing small robot drones that look like hummingbirds and a small flying bug that can fly close outside of a building or even inside undetected and record images that can be transmitted all over the world. The military technology in this movie some of the best I have ever seen depicted and is the backdrop of the the debates that go back and forth that are based on moral, legal and military complications. The decisions that are delayed, deferred and ultimately made and how they all conclude are the best part of the acting and final message of this movie.

It was sad to see Alan Rickman in one of his last performances in this movie and his last line really stood out as the best, “never tell a soldier the about the cost of war”. Alan Rickman was a great actor and he will definitely be missed. The actress Helen Mirren  is also very good in her role as a high level military officer who ultimately makes the final decision on whether to blow up the building.

This movie was well done and I do recommend it.

Eye in the Sky – IMDB

Back in the mid 80’s the actor Tom Selleck was just about the hottest celebrity on Television with the success of the TV Series Magnum PI . Everybody thought that he should easily be able to parlay that success into being a huge movie star, even after he supposedly turned down the starring role in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” which came out in 1981. After some failed attempts at being a movie actor with movie such as Lasiter and Runaway Selleck finally got the movie role of a lifetime with An Innocent Man , which came out in 1989. This great movie is a story about an innocent man who works as a repairman for Jet Aircraft and one day inside his own house he is mistaken for a drug dealer and then shot because he is holding a hair dryer. After this, the criminal and corrupt police officers frame him and stage a shooting, making it look like he shot at the police officers with an illegal gun he had in his possession as he lay wounded on the floor of his bathroom unconscious . What follows is years in prison and the attempts of his wife, played by Laila Robbins to get him out and dealing with the corrupt two cops who framed her husband.

In all my years of movie going I have never seen a movie more realistic in terms of the nightmare of being in prison  with animals when you have done nothing wrong. This movie also depicts the very harsh reality of the rules of prison which include the drugs, gang rape and murder which as commonplace as getting coffee in the outside world.  Selleck’s character in this movie, Jimmie Rainwood soon finds out that survival and the laws of the outside world do not apply inside a low level prison.  Within the first few weeks of Rainwood’s illegal incarceration, he finds out that he has to “stand up and take care of business”, which means murdering the head of a black gang in order to avoid being as they all called it “someones kid”. Rainwood is schooled on what to do and how to take care of business in prison by a prisoner who befriends him named Virgil Cane played expertly by F. Murray Abraham in what I consider one of this best roles. Their friendship and interaction during this movie is the best part of the whole story and they both were incarcerated by the same two corrupt police officers. After Cane instructs Rainwood and expertly organizes the plan to take care of business and kill the head of the black gang and what follows is an incredible scene in a large bathroom and a shiv with about as much drama and tension as I have ever seen in any movie. This one scene and the events leading up to it maintain a level of tension that is similar and maybe even exeeds the movie Heat which came out in 1995. This is what movies are all about and when they work this well they should be recognized. In my opinion, this movie with this gritty realism, tension, injustice and revenge is one of the best movies ever made and is largely unrecognized.

The last part of this movie is about Rainwood getting out of prison and then revenge against the two police officers who ruined his life that is one of the best conclusions to a movie I have ever seen. Revenge is always sweet and in the case of these two dirty criminal lowlife police officers, the revenge in this movie is one of the best final scenes of “getting even” ever produced. Many people would rather die than go to prison for any length of time, most especially if they are innocent and after seeing this movie you would definitely rather die than go through what Rainwood went through in this story. This movie also makes you think about all the people in this country unjustly imprisoned perhaps even for the same reason of corrupt police officers and this fact just adds to the believably of this story. There are several lines in this movie that stand up and are still memorable to this day; “you ain’t got to stand tall in here but you sure better stand up!” and F. Murray Abraham’s line when he started to teach Rainwood the way of the world in prison “Its simple in here, anybody fucks with me and its their life” and his final line at the very end of this movie, “Aint life a motherfucker”.

If you have never seen An Innocent Man, you owe it to yourself to see it as it is quite simply a great movie.

An Innocent Man – IMDB