He taught Elvis how to dance, he was an All-American Football player for Bear Bryant who is arguably the greatest college coach ever, he met JFK and JBJ, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, he was the greatest ping pong player of all-time, he exposed Watergate, he ran across the country, and he invested in some kind of fruit company which gave him more money than Davy Crockett.
All in all, Forrest Gump was an American Hero. And in 1994 Tom Hanks portrayal of Gump won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. The movie itself is a hallmark. Everyone has seen it and it truly is a great film. I mean, this movie is really, really good. It was so good that it won The Academy Award for Best Picture in 1994 too. But it shouldn’t have.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Forrest Gump. The movie is one of my all-time favorites. And if it was released any other year, I would say that it should have won Best Picture. But not in ‘94. In 1994 not just one, but two other films came out which were arguably better than Gump. The Shawshank Redemption, and Pulp Fiction.
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1994 was a phenomenal year, three of the greatest movies of all-time came out and only one could go home with Best Picture. I love Gump, and Shawshank is beautiful, but Pulp Fiction is a different breed of movie. It is smart, enticing, entertaining, and it is a cultural monument. So for the sake of argument, I will argue for Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus.
Pulp Fiction is a masterpiece of storytelling. The acting all round is top notch, and the film is consistently ranked as one of the best pictures of all time. And the energy of the movie is electric. You don’t know what is going to happen from one moment to the next. Tarantino creates this world of mystery in each scene where everything and anything can occur. And usually the characters experience extreme violence that is also heavily laced with pop culture references.
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As is expected of the academy, they once again chose the safer film to award with Forrest Gump. Both Shawshank and Pulp Fiction were rated R compared to the PG-13 rating given to Gump. And all in all, both Shawshank and Pulp Fiction were much darker in their scope than Gump was.
Pulp Fiction was especially dark, being described in some reviews as containing “Hyperreal Violence”. The academy awards giving this film the award for best picture would have been the right thing to do. But we don’t live in a perfect world. If the academy did give this film, or any other the other past films ive mentioned the best picture award, then they would have been harshly criticized. They academy has to give out awards to movies which are good, and don’t cross the line of being potentially politically and socially dangerous. This isn’t fair to the great films. But that’s just the way it is.
We all know the better film. It’s the one that says bad motherfucker on it.
Sources
https://darla0022.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/pulp-fiction-hyper-reality/
Melody
Imdb.com
Rottentomatoes.com
Apple.com
Apple.com
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