"Oh, I Am Not Mooning!"

Rating: 9/10 (15 March 2018)

I hadn't seen this movie in awhile, & only just now tripped over a Sundance reairing of its last 10 minutes. I was annoyed that dish gives it 3Â½:4 stars, it being an extremely rare case of a Hanks movie I can tolerate, and the fact of these last minutes (from the execution to the "finis") touching me into tears tells that. Hanks didn't portray his character at the last, but even so something of him, in which his portrayal was so "lived-in" effective, still embodied his older self played by a different actor. But also a pang of sorrow came to me over the untimely loss of Michael Clark Duncan, who likewise turned out nowhere near a phoned-in performance, & ever since the cinemagoing public have been diminished by the lack of his presence in ... well, a fill-in-the-blank on that. "How unfortunate." Still we do have what body of work in which he did appear, & if The Green Mile may be accounted the apex of that sadly truncated filmography, that is certainly nothing to moan much about; its premise may not be champagne-&-tiger-prawns delectable to the eye & ears, but that he and Hanks (and David Morse, rarely better himself) imbued into it such depth in their portrayals that we don't even see that they ARE acting, gives this film certain joys through its pains that render it uniquely inspirational. "May he rest."