Robin Wright Penn Movie:

		List Price: $49.99		Label: Paramount Salesrank: 4217 Released: November 3, 2009
		Our Price: $24.99
		Used Price: $66.96
		MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
"Stupid is as stupid does," says Forrest Gump (played by Tom Hanks in an Oscar-winning performance) as he discusses his relative level of intelligence with a stranger while waiting for a bus. Despite his sub-normal IQ, Gump leads a truly charmed life, with a ringside seat for many of the most memorable events of the second half of the 20th century. Entirely without trying, Forrest teaches Elvis Presley to dance, becomes a football star, meets John F. Kennedy, serves with honor in Vietnam, meets Lyndon Johnson, speaks at an anti-war rally at the Washington Monument, hangs out with the Yippies, defeats the Chinese national team in table tennis, meets Richard Nixon, discovers the break-in at the Watergate, opens a profitable shrimping business, becomes an original investor in Apple Computers, and decides to run back and forth across the country for several years. Meanwhile, as the remarkable parade of his life goes by, Forrest never forgets Jenny (Robin Wright Penn), the girl he loved as a boy, who makes her own journey through the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s that is far more troubled than the path Forrest happens upon. Featured alongside Tom Hanks are Sally Field as Forrest's mother; Gary Sinise as his commanding officer in Vietnam; Mykelti Williamson as his ill-fated Army buddy who is familiar with every recipe that involves shrimp; and the special effects artists whose digital magic place Forrest amidst a remarkable array of historical events and people.

Description of Forrest Gump (Chocolate Box Giftset) [Blu-ray]:
The Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Director Robert Zemeckis, and Best Actor Tom Hanks, this unlikely story of a slow-witted but good-hearted man somehow at the center of the pivotal events of the 20th century is a funny and heartwarming epic. Hanks plays the title character, a shy Southern boy in love with his childhood best friend (Robin Wright) who finds that his ability to run fast takes him places. As an All-Star football player he meets John F. Kennedy; as a soldier in Vietnam he's a war hero; and as a world champion Ping-Pong player he's hailed by Richard Nixon. Becoming a successful shrimp-boat captain, he still yearns for the love of his life, who takes a quite different and much sadder path in life. The visual effects incorporating Hanks into existing newsreel footage is both funny and impressive, but the heart of the film lies in its sweet love story and in the triumphant performance of Hanks as an unassuming soul who savors the most from his life and times. --Robert Lane

Forrest Gump (Chocolate Box Giftset) [Blu-ray] Reviews:
BLU-RAY-GREAT FILM BUT ROCK SOUNDTRACK IS MISSING!
2009-11-16 - I love this film and just had to get the Blu-Ray version. It looks crisp and clean as you would expect, but for some strange reason, the rock music soundtrack has vanished. The film's normal soundtrack is there, but when the rock music is supposed to kick in (Vietnam for instance), you hear about half a second then silence. I have to say that it totally ruined the film for me and my wife, as this was such an integral part of the emotions that this film can evoke. I do have this film on normal DVD and I compared the two, just to be sure. I will be returning this copy to Amazon, and will let you know what the outcome is. I wonder if this a single disc fault, or a fault in the copying process for all these discs?

A film created not for people, but for "consumers."
2009-11-16 - Remember that intergalactic cruise ship in "Wall-E," with all those obese passengers hypnotized by their video screens. I bet the video they were watching was "Forrest Gump."

This is a film produced by left wing Hollywood financial fatcats designed to make uneducated right-wing people feel good about themselves.

Do you really think that one of the producers-- whose family bought and vivisected CBS just for fun-- really sits on his porch swing blowing kisses to Mama? Do you really think that the fabulously talented screenwriter Eric Roth -- who also wrote "The Insider," the brilliant Michael Mann expose of the same CBS his boss's family tried to undermine-- would raise his sons to be little Forrests?

"Forrest Gump," fantastically realized as it is, is a cynical, calculated film.

Don't get me wrong: the idea of a wise fool is wonderful. He appears in every culture. But generally speaking, the story about the wise fool imparts wisdom. If you look carefully at "Forrest Gump" you have 90% artificial flavoring.

This idea offends some people, because they love the movie. Well, if you saw the movie when you were a kid, I can understand. But there comes a time when it's worth opening your eyes-- and your mind. Because you've been brainwashed.

In the me-first America of today, a product is good if it reinforces the idea that the consumer is good. Therefore, a movie is good if it makes the viewer feel good.

Fair enough. Hollywood has always been mostly about straightforward entertainment, right?

Well, yes and no.

In the days of classic Hollywood cinema, audiences could feel good by identifying with John Wayne's eternal outsider, Humphrey Bogart's code of honor, Scarlett O'Hara's astonishing persistence, and Fred Astaire's grace-- a wide variety of human characteristics-- all of which-- in their complexity-- somehow made audiences of the time feel better they were. Maybe because they enlarged the scope of what was felt to be human.

In other words, American consumers had the humility to identify with characters bigger, braver, and more foolish than they were themselves. Characters who suffered and learned. This was, after all, the reason people exposed themselves to drama from the time of the Greeks.

In today's consumerist America, however, audiences don't want to get their hair messed up. Characters like Scarlett and Sam Spade seem too far from home for most of us. We want to identify with characters like Forrest Gump, who gets it all without even trying. Or Good Will Hunting, the world's greatest street fighter, legal eagle, nuclear physicist, sleuth, lover, and who knows what else. And all he needed to get the girl was Robin Williams weeping over him and uttering the magic words: "You're really good!"

Unlike Sam Spade, Scarlett O'Hara, Shane, or Terry Malloy, Forrest and Will-- the heroes for the Wal-Mart American-- don't really learn through suffering. They don't have to: they're perfect just the way they are. The only thing wrong in their worlds is that everybody else didn't know how perfect they were before they made the movie. And by buying a ticket, the audience gets to take part in the canonization...of their own egos.

In other words, the FORREST GUMP consumer is a weak, selfish, shallow, lazy narcissist, unable to bend his/her imagination to identify with characters who are flawed- and thus actually human. In other words, this post-modern self-centered character would reject anything remotely human-- if somehow it got past the guards at the entrance to the shopping mall.

Naturally the Consumer Creature will call a movie "good" if it allows him/her to remain in the bubble of their shallowness. Otherwise, it's "weird."

I guess that's why Wal-Mart doesn't have a big selection of real books, or jazz, or classical music. Or why Shakespeare, and Mark Twain, and Thomas Jefferson are excluded from the minds of the worst generation in the history of the country. Hunter Thompson called them a "generation of swine" and I'd be inclined to agree.

Forrest Gump is the Moby Dick of this generation. It is the white whale of their shallowness, and, I'm afraid, it will take us all to the bottom of the ocean.

Someday-- and maybe soon-- historians (perhaps in China, India, and Brazil-- countries where young people actually go to school to learn) will view movies like this as a symptom of a culture in intellectual--and moral-- freefall. They will say, that was when American stopped being a leader-- and started its descent. (Of course, even if the U.S.A. morphs into a state of slave-workers for a future Chinese Empire, the workers drones will undoubtedly be told they are still number one, and they will go through life believing it.)

Meanwhile, the future historians will look at Forrest in the pantheon of great characters in literature (Lear, Hamlet, Ahab...Finn, Gump) and marvel at the capacity of the human being to rise--- and to fall.

Forrest isn't, in fact, a character at all-- he's a ball of tricks designed to lure the audience's most infantile self inside.

This is fascism as consumer culture. It doesn't matter how technically impressive the movie is, or that the scene where Forrest runs can make anybody cry. This is the American version of "Triumph of the Will," the moment when it became practically illegal to have a mind.

By the way, Robert Zemeckis' former writing partner, Bob Gale, co-creator of the BACK TO THE FUTURE series (the only films Bob Zemeckis should truly be proud of, except for USED CARS) accused Zemeckis of cynicism when he made FORREST GUMP. Zemeckis claims he doesn't understand the accusation, and I believe him. I don't think he understands what cynicism is, or how this film so perfectly embodies it. And that puts him into the 95% of America that hasn't the slightest idea what it means actually to think. And how criminal it is not to. Especially when you have the power.

Again, to those of you who are offended by this comment, why not stop to consider that maybe living a shallow life is even worse than being offended. In any case, history will judge you far more harshly than one writer possibly could. Why not try to rouse yourselves from your slumber and rebel against this and all the other big lies that have pacified you into a sub-human state. (Do you really want to spend your life like those butterballs on the cruise space ship in WALL-E?)

As someone who lived through the sixties, I can tell you that the film itself is an insult to all the men and women who struggled and shed their blood in that time of striving. And their blood was not wasted! Voting rights, civil rights, environmental protection-- these are the fruits of that struggle. Bubba Gump and his 400 pound wobblers are the victims of the myth propagated by Hollywood's money machine, in the personification of "Forrest Gump."

Free your minds. Think. And wake up.

Gift set is garbage
2009-11-09 - Fantastic movie. Awful gift set. I completely regret my decision to purchase the gift set. No blu-ray case for the movies, gigantic box, nothing worth the extra money. I'm mad at myself for ordering this. Get the normal blu-ray with case instead.

Life is like a box of chocolates
2009-11-09 - Tom Hanks is brilliant in this movie. this has to be one of his best performances ever. i love this movie and so will you. recommend it for everyone

"My gorge rises at it" -- Hamlet
2009-11-08 - Is there room on here to fit all of what Forrest Gump means to me and possibly others? Probably not! Forrest Gump mixes so many styles of film in one movie it is incredible. It is a comedy, drama, war movie, love story, one of spiritual enlightenment, but most importantly it is about a life. We all walk this earth and from the beginning of our life, we grow, we laugh and love, we have pain and heartache, and eventually we die. How will others remember us? How in a positive way have we touched others during our life?

The Blu-Ray version of this film is like watching it again for the first time. There are little things in the background that stand-out unlike the regular version. The battle scene is visually striking.

In the play Hamlet, Hamlet is in the graveyard and comes across Yorrick's skeleton. Yorrick was the king's jester and Hamlet spent a great time with him when he was younger. As he holds his skull, he speaks the lines, "My gorge rises at it (his skull)" meaning his throat rises at it. I always took this to mean his spirit was moved to the point of being choked up! There are quite a few scenes in this film that bring me to that point. To me these aren't superficial feelings, as in other films, but touches the spirit, and that is why I feel that Forrest Gump is more than a film, but a life lesson.