**** (Out of four)

Rating: 10/10 (7 May 1999)

People, this is a great film. And, if you want to get picky about it, it's the only big blockbuster to make it onto the IMDB Top 250 in the past ten years, with the exception of "Terminator 2". That just goes to show that it is not "hype over content". Many people were turned off by the idea of a stupid person as the all-encompassing Everyman, but these were the same people who left the movie theater dry-eyed and continued on their very way, looking for advice from Madison Avenue, dumping their oh-so-liberal views on whoever would be genial enough to listen, and oh yes, condescendingly talking down to the local village idiot and then making fun of him behind his back. Believe me, I have known people in my time described as "village idiots", and the personality with which Tom Hanks imbues Gump's character is dead-on accurate. The film touched me in so many ways that my throat still lumps up every time the feather ascends to the sky with Alan Silvestri's BEAUTIFUL music playing in the background. Zemeckis should be proud of himself for this one, which I think will go down as his masterpiece (and that's saying something from the man who made "Back to the Future" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"). Forrest Gump may have been slow, but he was anything but a simpleton...those who denounce people like him and their naive worldview just envy the fact that their lives are built around a shimmering ideal brighter than all of the sexcapades and trivial pettiness of normality. Oh yes, and for the person who commented on this film as "The worst Best Picture Oscar winner of the 90s"...obviously you haven't seen "Shakespeare in Love".