Run, Forrest! Preferably, Directly into a Combine Thresher!

In case the title doesn't make it clear, let me state one thing unambiguously.

I HATE the film Forrest Gump.*

*But only because it's a worthless, trite, hack-job, piece of shit that only exists to take away two and a half hours of your life that you might otherwise do something productive with.

I've gone so far in the past as to state unequivocally that every single person involved in the making of the movie should be beaten to death with a VHS copy just for having inflicted it on the world.*

*With the exception of Gary Sinise.  He's suffered enough

So, earlier today I was taking one of those online quizzes that seem to be one of the three reasons that Facebook exists.  The quiz was: How many of these 100 important books have you read.  Now, I'm down with literacy, and I get that this kind of lists is fairly subjective (but seriously... Bridget Jones' Diary...?  No.  Just No.)

I was nearing the end of the quiz when I came across entry 98 - John Kennedy Toole's* steaming excremental tome, A Confederacy of Dunces.

*Yes, I know he committed suicide years before it was published and his mother pushed to get it published posthumously and blah blah blah.  That's all very sad.  The book still sucks.

This caused me to publicly make a pissy comment* about the quiz in question, in which I referred to A Confederacy as the Forrest Gump of literature**

*One of the other two reasons Facebook exists.

** Yes, I know it was also a book.

I should clarify what I mean by that.  When I refer to anything as being the Forrest Gump of its Oeuvre, what I mean to say is that it is relentlessly shit, and yet people insist on pretending like it's not only not shit, but somehow an amazing breakthrough in whatever medium it's infesting.

So, in the interest of clearing this up - Here are the reasons why Forrest Gump is utterly, relentlessly, Shit.

1: The moral of the story is pretty much 'Go ahead and pity-f*ck the developmentally disabled guy who has a crush on you because you never know when you might accidentally die of AIDS in the early 80s and have to dump your kid on him'

2: It substitutes - at EVERY turn - crass sentimental nostalgia for character development, theme, plot, symbolism and storytelling.  We're not supposed to be following a character's journey (which is good, because Forrest clearly doesn't take one - he's 100% unchanged by each and every event of the film.  But we're not supposed to notice that.  We're supposed to spend the entire movie going, 'Aww...remember John Lennon?  Remember that shit happens T-shirt? Remember when films were supposed to be about plot or character development?'  Neither does Robert Zemeckis.)

3: And this is my real problem with the movie-

IF YOU SET UP A BOOKEND STRUCTURE FOR YOUR STORY YOU DO NOT GET TO SPEND 45 MINUTES POINTLESSLY SCREWING AROUND AFTER THE FINAL BOOKEND SCENE.

It's not my fault as a viewer that you completely forgot to tell a story before that point, and it's too late to try to do so now. Particularly when the story you cram into those last 45 minutes is so relentlessly condescending, trite and noxious.

Honestly, I would rather spend two hours and twenty-five minutes helping someone control their gastro-intestinal bleed than sit through this again. At least the guy with the GI bleed would KNOW that he was pouring shit all over me, and might even be apologetic about it.

I'm glad we got that cleared up.