A Comparison Of The Movie Vs. P. Movie

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I think it is safe to say that it is more common to hear “the book is much better than the movie” than the other way around. I like to read a good book and I love a good movie. If you consider all the failed attempts to convert great books into great movies, it is obvious that the task of transforming the books' story to a movie is not quite easy. With books, we can enter the minds of our characters in a way that we just cannot do in the audio-visual medium of film. We create the visuals with our imagination in books, but a good movie brings those visuals to life. At the risk of not being entirely accurate, a book’s strength is in going underneath the surface of things, a movie’s is of bringing that surface to life.
However, there are always …show more content…

Let’s look at the things I love about the movie.
First, its sense of narrative. I love how the story is put together, where we start with that feather floating into that quaint town square and then enter the mind of a rather idiotic, yet charming character sitting on a bus bench chatting to a total stranger. The movie then expertly uses Tom Hanks’ voice-overs to flashback into Gump’s life, only occasionally coming back to the present to remind us that this is HIS story as HE sees it.
In that way, I find it rather easy to forgive its politics, because its worldview is a simplistic one that comes out of a rather simplistic, yet genuine person.
Second, its sense of history. What the movie does that the book really doesn’t do is turn Gump’s personal story into a story about America from the 1950s until the 1980s. From the early scenes of a young Gump teaching Elvis Presley to do that crazy dance of his to the scenes of a long-haired Gump in the late 1970s purchasing some stock in a “fruit company” that turns out to be Apple Computers, we get to watch not only Gump evolve, but America …show more content…

They realized it was, at its core, a good idea—follow this idiot through various misadventures. But they decided to add a historical perspective to it and they decided to make it about how magical and unpredictable life can be, no matter who we are, and how important it is to be good-hearted to each other (because it is our loved ones who often help us through our toughest challenges).
I read one review on the Internet that said the book was better because it was darker. This might be true with regard to its politics—one of the few saving features of the book is Forrest’s frequent outbursts that the Vietnam War was “a bunch of shit.” In this way, book Forrest seems a bit more conscience and cynical about the way the world really works. And it might be darker in that Forrest frequently has to do things on his own, not relying on his friends, in order to get out of trouble. But for a book that is supposedly so dark, it was just too silly and too hard to believe

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