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List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Paramount
Salesrank: 436
Released: August 28, 2001 |
| Our Price: $7.62 |
| Used Price: $2.41 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A sweet natured man with an IQ of 70 personally experiences all of the important events of three decades of American life.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 29-DEC-2004
Media Type: DVD
Description of Forrest Gump (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition):
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 (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition) 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 - In the Wal-Mart 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 Wal-Mart 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 American 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, the modern American would reject anything remotely human-- if somehow it got past the guards at the entrance to the shopping mall.
Naturally the Wal-Mart American will call a movie "good" if it allows them 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.
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?)
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.
