Word: gumped
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Ever since the roaring critical and commercial success of The World According to Garp (1978), the arrival of a new John Irving novel has been an occasion for intense interest and sometimes febrile arguments. Irving fans applaud his jam-packed plots, his innocent heroes (the line from Garp to Gump is not hard to draw) and his overt, Dickensian sympathy for damaged or endangered children. Critics retort that Irving's heart may be in the right place, but his head is not -- that he actually exploits for shock value the very characters whose welfare he pretends to champion...
...does media parodies too, and good ones. Nick Bakay has nailed the sensitive-macho posturing of NYPD Blue's David Caruso, and the show has lampooned everything from Forrest Gump to a dippy model turned TV host named Bagitta. But She TV's horizons are broader. That became clear its first week, in an inspired sketch called "What Do Women Want?" Ostensibly a parody of a game show, it turned into a sly satire of the gulf between the sexes; a lone male contestant is trapped in a world where the rules are fuzzy and he's the only...
...Hollywood line is that this has been a summer of adult movies. But Forrest Gump, Wolf and Clear and Present Danger are not primarily for adults -- that is, for grownups in search of films a bit more demanding than those in the standard coming-of-age, horror and thriller genres. Somebody has to wonder: Can there be other kinds of pictures? And if they exist, can they connect with a sufficient number of appreciative viewers...
Much as it cheered Ronald Reagan, who, more than Schweik or Candide, is the real proto-Gump. Reagan too was relentlessly upbeat. Reagan too was extraordinarily lucky. And his luck, like Gump's, was often built on the backs of people who suffered off-screen. Forrest had bankrupt shrimpers, martyred Vietnam buddies, and his wife, whose death was remarkably demure, considering her ailment. Reagan scored points off America's poor; somehow managed to cloak himself in heroism while apologizing for a needless screw-up that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut; and avoided tarnishing his reputation for optimism by spending...
Moviegoers recently exiting the showing of Gump near my Manhattan building probably walked smack into the local legless beggar. Poverty, homelessness and physical disability are not what one likes to grapple with on a nice day out / with the kids. But one thing you can bet on: his legs cannot be restored by Industrial Light & Magic...