Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks)

Back in 1994, when we were living in the United States, we saw ‘Forrest Gump’ at the cinema. I remember enjoying it very much, despite it being sad towards the end. I had no idea it would be considered an iconic classic twenty-five years later.

We acquired the DVD inexpensively about fifteen years ago, I suppose. I vaguely remember watching it - or parts of it - after we did, but it was more than time to see it again. It’s quite a long film - nearly two and a half hours, so we needed an evening when we could start earlier than usual.

Tom Hanks stars as the young man Forrest who has an IQ of 75, a kind and generous heart, and a gift for running. We see him in the opening sequence sitting at a bus stop, holding a large box of chocolates, and chatting to anyone who sits down next to him. He starts to tell the story of his life, beginning with his first shoes which came with leg braces when he was perhaps seven or eight years old. They were supposedly to help his back become straight.

Forrest’s mother (Sally Field) is loving and supportive throughout, encouraging him to consider himself as good as anyone else, and to achieve whatever he can. She is determined to have him educated in a mainstream school, and willing to do something rather sordid to achieve her wish; however it all happens off-screen with only a few noises, which young Forrest doesn’t understand. We see everything through his eyes, which gives a wonderfully ironical touch throughout the film.

For Forrest finds that, supported by his mother and his one friend Jenny, he can do anything he wants to. His incredible running speed means he can escape the bullies, and he’s spotted by an American football coach. Despite his limited academic prowess, he is able to get a scholarship to college to play football, and to his mother’s great satisfaction, he gains a degree. He then goes into the army and is sent to Vietnam…

It’s a very engaging storyline; Forrest’s determination to help people and to keep running lead to all kinds of unexpected benefits, most of which he doesn’t fully understand. He gets to meet three US Presidents, he is given a bravery award, he finds himself caught up in an anti-war demonstration, and later becomes a TV celebrity. There are some very cleverly made sequences showing him apparently meeting famous people. One of the extras on the second DVD in my set shows some of the techniques used to fit the actors concerned seamlessly into archive black and white footage.

But despite some low-key humour and the satirical approach to the whole thing, it’s basically quite a sad story. Our version is rated 15, which slightly surprised me; there’s some implied nudity but nothing overt; some sexual activity, but nothing at all shown outright. There are a few instances of ‘strong’ language (though nowhere near as many as in the book on which the film is based) - but really very few. I assume the rating is due to the violence in the war scenes - and although brief, it is quite gory at times.

There are no villains, there isn’t even really a storyline as such, yet it’s a wonderful film. Tom Hanks is superb as Forrest, as is Michael Conner Humphreys who plays him as a child. It’s a celebration of an ordinary person who is not good-looking or intelligent, yet achieves beyond most people’s wildest dreams. The ending is bittersweet but overall encouraging.

Although I gather that the film is rated 12 nowadays (PG-13 in the US), I don’t think I’d show this to a young teenager. Most of them wouldn’t understand the humour or even know who most of the black-and-white famous people were, and the story as a whole could be quite disturbing to a sensitive child. I doubt if it would interest most of them anyway.

But to older teens and adults, I would recommend this highly. The extras are worth seeing too, if you have a version that includes them. We were particularly taken with the screen test interviews for the children.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's DVD Reviews

Ricki and the Flash (starring Meryl Streep)

This film was recommended to me, I assume, because I have very much liked other films with Meryl Streep. She is an outstanding actress, in my view; she becomes the characters she plays in a way that’s rare. The variety of roles she has undertaken is astonishing - and ‘Ricki and the Flash’ is no exception.

Streep, who was over 65 when this film was shot, plays Ricki, a rock singer who hasn’t hit the big time, but plays regularly in a somewhat sleazy bar. During the week she works in a supermarket on the tills, with the aim of making ends meet; but she struggles to do so. Ricki could have passed for forty when we first see her singing and playing with her band, ‘The Flash’; as events turn out we realised that she was probably supposed to be in her fifties.

Early in the film we learned that Ricki’s real name is Linda, and she used to be married to the respectable, well-off Pete (Kevin Kline). They have mostly been out of touch for years, since she abandoned him and their three young children to follow her dreams of becoming a star. But a crisis has hit: their daughter Julie’s husband has left her, and Julie is seriously depressed. Julie is played by Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer.

So Ricki flies to Indianapolis to spend a few days with her ex-husband and daughter, greeted at first with animosity, but surprisingly quickly she finds that she can help. Her sons are less keen to see her when they have dinner together: one of them has just got engaged, but doesn’t plan to invite his mother to the wedding….

There are several themes in this story. The main one is about what real motherhood means, and how being with children as they grow up matters more than giving birth to them. It’s about following dreams, about family relationships in general, about the contrast between material wealth and talent. There are one or two mildly amusing moments and a great deal that’s poignant and thought-provoking.

Having said that, it’s not the greatest script, and I didn’t much like the music; rock of that nature isn’t my style, and I found it rather too loud at times. Inevitably there’s quite a lot of music, as we see Ricki on stage; in one of the extras we learned that all the music is performed by the characters live to camera, and that Meryl Streep had to learn how to play a guitar in order to take this part.

Greg (Rick Springfield), Ricki’s lead guitarist and boyfriend, is excellent in his role too as a caring and understanding - as well as extremely talented - man. I was surprised to read that the actor is the same age as Streep; he, too, could easily have passed for forty or fifty.

The rating is 12 (PG-13 in the US) and that seems about right to me. There’s one implied intimate scene but we don’t see anything other than a few clothes being discarded in advance. There is some bad language but not the worst words, and there’s no violence at all. The content wouldn’t be of much interest to children or younger teens anyway.

It was rather different from anything we had seen for a while, and we thought it very well made. Recommended, if you are a fan of Meryl Streep and would like to see her in something entirely different. Or if you like films based around rock music.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's DVD Reviews

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (starring Matthew Broderick)

I’m pretty sure we saw the film ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ at the cinema, shortly after it was released in the summer of 1986. We thought it amusing, if exaggerated and unrealistic in places. It stayed in my mind as a 1980s classic, and when we first started collecting DVDs about fifteen years ago, it’s one that I bought inexpensively.

However, as far as I recall, we never actually watched the DVD, although our sons probably did. But last night, wanting something light weight and not too lengthy to watch, we decided to see it. I recalled that it was about a teenager who took an unauthorised day off school, but not much more. My husband remembered something about a red car…

My first surprise on watching it was that Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) looks so young! The actor must have been in his mid-twenties when the filming was done, but Ferris is only supposed to be seventeen or eighteen - in his last year at an American high school. He could have passed for fifteen or sixteen, in my opinion.

Some of the film is narrated by Ferris, directly to camera, as he explains some of the way his mind works. He’s a young man of ingenuity, able to hack his way into computers (admittedly rather basic ones at that period), and also to anticipate various other people’s reactions to his own actions. We first meet him as he is pretending - quite realistically - to be sick, insisting that he has to go to school while his parents tell him he must stay home. His sister Jean (Jennifer Grey) knows perfectly well what is going on, and is annoyed with him, but doesn’t give him away.

Once everyone else is out of the house, Ferris leaps into action. He persuades his friend Cameron to drive him, and fools the school into releasing his girlfriend Sloane for the day. He is highly manipulative, but in such a friendly, charming way that people can’t resist him… and Ferris seems to fall on his feet every time he pushes the boundaries. Of course it’s meant to be humorous, and his luck and charm are exaggerated in places. But we know of one or two people with this kind of personality - and, in general, remarkable luck - so could see that he might well have been based on a real person.

There’s a lot of slapstick, some situational humour, and the ongoing tension of wondering whether or not Ferris and his friends are going to get away with their increasingly risky behaviour. The school principal, Mr Rooney, is shown as an archetypical bad guy, not merely hoping to see justice done, but determined to make life miserable for Ferris. While I could see his point, initially, of not wanting someone to get away with playing hooky so often, he is so nasty - albeit in a comic way, at times - that it was hard to do anything other than root for the rule-breakers.

The school is shown as extremely tedious, with the most boring lessons, students half asleep or involved in different activities while teachers drone on. I hope that part, at least, was unrealistically exaggerated. But it made it easier to support Ferris, who probably learned a great deal more in his day off than he would have done in school.

There’s a far more serious theme too, in that of Cameron, an unhappy, chronically ill young man who has missed far more school than Ferris has, and who - as become increasingly obvious during the film - has a sad and neglectful family life. There’s a dramatic scene at the end that would horrify some car enthusiasts, but it is the start of something more positive, although we don’t get to see the outcome.

The actors were very well-cast, the pace excellent, and we both enjoyed the film very much. It’s rated 15 in the UK, which seems rather high by today’s standards; there’s some strong language and innuendoes, but they are not excessive. There’s nothing explicit, and the violence is minor and infrequent. The US rating of PG-13 is more appropriate in my view; I expect that nowadays it would be rated 12 in the UK, or even PG.

There are some extras, made about twenty later when the DVD was produced. It was interesting to see some of the cast look back on the making of the film, but it was more reminiscence than anything particularly engaging.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's DVD Reviews

Pride and Prejudice (starring Keira Knightley)

(Amazon UK link)

In the past couple of weeks, we watched the lengthy BBC adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with a friend and her young teenage daughter. They were interested to see the 2005 film version starring Keira Knightley, so we watched that with them a couple of days ago.

When we first saw it, just over ten years ago, it had been awhile since we had seen the BBC version and we thought the film well done, on the whole. This time it was impossible not to make comparisons. The story, set around the end of the 18th century, is well-known: Mr and Mrs Bennet have five daughters, and Mrs Bennet is keen to marry them off. She hopes that at least one of them will marry a wealthy man, because their family home is entailed; so when Mr Bennet dies, it will be inherited by his cousin Mr Collins.

Into the neighbourhood come the very rich Mr Bingley and his friend Mr Darcy. Mrs Bennet is delighted when Mr Bingley shows an immediate attraction to her eldest daughter Jane. However Mr Darcy is rather cold and proud, and comes into conflict with Elizabeth, the second daughter and most intelligent of the five. Elizabeth is her father’s obvious favourite; he considers his three younger daughters remarkably silly, even though Mary (the middle one) is ‘bookish’ and uninclined to the frivolities of her younger sisters Kitty and Lydia.

The budget for this film was clearly much higher than that of the BBC adaptation. The balls were lavish, the costumes gorgeous, the stately homes superb. The setting for the Bennets’ house seemed more realistic, too; it came across as rather smaller, not in a top neighbourhood. On the negative side, fitting into just over two hours rather than five and a half, a great deal had to be cut. If we hadn’t read the book or seen the other version, it would have been quite hard to follow the story at times.

We thought that Keira Knightley was well cast as Lizzie Bennet, as was Rosamunde Pike as Jane. The younger sisters had far less of a role in this adaptation than the BBC one, but they were also nicely done. Simon Woods as Mr Bingley was remarkably similar to the character in the BBC version, although he seemed younger and a bit over-enthusiastic at times. Matthew MacFadyen makes a good Mr Darcy, too, although we all agreed that he could not compare to Colin Firth’s portrayal.

We thought Mrs Bennet (Brenda Blethyn) was better acted and more realistic than her equivalent in the BBC version, although without the high drama and screeching she was less amusing. Unfortunately Mr Bennet (Donald Sutherland) was not at all well cast, in our opinions. He came across as very elderly, almost doddering, and there was very little humour in his ironical exchanges with Lizzie and others. He was probably the most disappointing character.

Mr Collins (Tom Hollander) is less horribly smarmy than his BBC equivalent; we thought him more realistic, perhaps, but less amusing. However we were very pleasantly surprised - I had totally forgotten - when Lady Catherine de Burgh appeared, brilliantly portrayed by Judi Dench. She seemed more realistically haughty and cold than the somewhat exaggerated BBC version - though, again, less amusing on the whole.

So it was an interesting experience; perhaps it’s unfair to make so many deliberate comparisons, as the film was an entirely different project, and had to catch the essence of the story while missing out some scenes (and characters) entirely.

However the one part we all agreed was clichéd and disappointing was the ending. Without giving spoilers, it includes soft sunlight, people going to meet each other outside in a scene which didn’t happen that way at all in the book, and a very awkward kissed hand, leading into the credits. No real ending, no weddings, and a sense that it had finished too abruptly.

Thus, despite some clear advantages in a couple of characters and the more lavish settings, we all agreed that the BBC version was far truer to the book, and more enjoyable to watch overall.

Other recommended adaptations of Jane Austen books include:

• Sense and Sensibility
• Persuasion (1995 BBC version)
• Pride and Prejudice (BBC series)
• Emma (ITV version)

Review copyright 2019 Sue's DVD Reviews