‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 Years Later: A Bad Movie That Gets Worse With Age
www.indiewire.com
"Gump" backlash is nothing new. But these days, it's even more problematic than it used to be.

I was gonna do a writeup but this author sums up my thoughts pretty well. I always hated how the movie portrayed Jenny. It's like the movie tries to punish her for daring to move against the broader (white, patriarchal, militaristic, conservative) culture. Notice how she only receives redemption when she functionally gives up her counter-cultural ways and accepts her role as a mom. And even then she still gets "punished" for her "sins" by dying of AIDS like it's some Grimm fairy tale. Feels a bit like incel fan-fiction, in hindsight.

And of course the movie panders to white reactionary notions of the Black Panthers. They were just angry black men who were reverse racists. Gross.

Forrest Gump is incredibly reactionary and it's terrible. It's the conservative boomers' attempt to tell a morality tale in which they are the ultimate victors over their contemporaries who dared for something different.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    how is someone going to write an article about Forrest Gump to critique it without getting into the normalized SA of a intellectually disabled and highly suggestible person? even in the theater when that flick came out and was a total boomer popcorn flick, there was a weird vibe when that scene hit and someone said, "what". but the movie went on and we all memory holed it immediately and glossed over it to focus on how haley joel osment is a cute, smart kid so how we got him doesn't matter.

    that movie is fucking crazy. the plot is there just to create opportunities for the whole green screen/deep fake technology that was new at the time, so boomers could mainline their nostalgia, but man it's full of crazy ass shit.

    that said, i will always laugh at how the hardass drill instructor "loves" gump, loudy, publicly lavishes him with praise, and the line that if it wouldn't ruin a perfectly good enlisted man, he would recommend him for OCS (Officer Candidate School) and how gump is going to become a general someday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONH-pxBMJu4 there's a severe criticism of the military in there that still makes me laugh.