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Entries in Tom Hanks (89)

Sunday
Oct202013

LFF: Saving Mr. Banks

David brings you one of the first reviews from the London Film Festival's world premiere of this unseen Oscar tip. Will Disney add some more statues to his vast collection?

Emma Thompson is an exquisite crier. Friends, acquaintances and enemies still cite her strand of Love Actually as easily the film’s strongest aspect, and her reaction to her husband’s thoughtful but incorrect present as one of the actress’ finest moments. There’s something about the way the composed, somewhat remote attitude crumbles, drawn all over Thompson’s face, that makes it so sympathetic and wistfully beautiful to witness. And it’s due to this, partly, that Saving Mr. Banks is as successful as it is – the experienced, perceptive way both Thompson and co-star Tom Hanks have of selling their monologues and close-ups, which in less experienced hands could so easily have seemed hackneyed and manipulative.

John Lee Hancock’s tale of the negotiations between Walt Disney (Hanks) and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers (Thompson) is pretty standard sentimental stuff, quickly establishing the hearty transatlantic binary between uptight Brit and liberal American. Travers insists on being called “Mrs. Travers”; Walt, his employees whisper to her, only works on a first name basis. Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith’s screenplay mines this for as many laughs as it can possibly produce. [More]

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Saturday
Oct192013

Tom Hanks, All-American

[Here's Deborah with a personal story that any movie-loving reader with a kid (or that hopes to have one might enjoy). How will you introduce them to the movies? And who will they love onscreen? - N]



 

Tom Hanks was my son's first favorite actor.

 

I started my son on classic movies when he was just eight years old. Arthur has Asperger's, and was intensely sensitive to any content that was even vaguely upsetting. At the age of nine, he could have worked for Screenit.com or the MPAA. My solution was to introduce him to movies from a time of more delicate sensibilities. Starting with Miracle on 34th Street, we moved to Arsenic and Old Lace, which opened into a long-term screwball comedy kick. Musicals, too, became a major part of our lives, up to and including Arthur's passion for Gene Kelly and his entry into dance school.

 

But at the movie theater, it was strictly kid stuff: Pixar, Harry Potter, Batman. Christmas of 2002, I asked my then-twelve-year old if he wanted to see a grown-up movie. He loved Catch Me If You Can. About a year later, I heard him say that Tom Hanks was his favorite actor. I was surprised, but realized that in fact, we'd seen Forrest Gump at home together, and he'd seen Apollo 13 at school, making Tom Hanks one of the few living actors that Arthur had seen in multiple movies, and the only one he really remembered.

 

Tom Hanks, all-American, the late 20th/early 21st century Jimmy Stewart. Arthur liked Hanks; he found he could connect to him. Hanks is also, I'd argue, one of the most tasteful modern actors. He knows how to read a script with a discerning eye. Sure, he's made some clunkers (Larry Crowne), but in general, Hanks's name in the cast adds credibility to a film. I mean, is John Cusack less talented than Tom Hanks? I don't think so, but his career suggests he has no ability to tell wheat from chaff, so when you see that Cusack is in a movie, you don't think, "Well, it'll probably be good."



 

But Hanks, with his pretty good taste and his aw-shucks accessibility, has managed to star in a whole bunch of movies that are just about perfect for introducing someone to the love of film. You can start with his voice in Toy Story, and eventually land as an adult at Captain Phillips, perhaps stopping at Saving Mr. Banks in the tween years.

 

I checked in with Arthur while writing this article. His favorite actor is now Liev Schreiber, but he still admires Tom Hanks.

 

Tuesday
Oct152013

Curio: Hanks a Million

Alexa here. With the release of Captain Phillips, the annual game of reevaluating Tom Hanks is afoot. Does the Everyman dial it down to play a non-hero hero, or is he in fact at his most Tom Hanksiest to date?  Did Gravity beat him in the space race, since it beat him at the box office this week? I, for one, don't care: I love Tom Hanks for all his versatility and charm and Tom Hanksiness, so there.  

Chuck and Wilson dolls by Mauro Fazzini.

Here are some Hanks-related curios (thank you cards, coloring books, etcetera) for those, like me, who still feel the love...

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Tuesday
Oct152013

12 Links Today

Cinema Blend 50 Shades of Grey might go with Alexander Skarsgård (and a new screenplay)  now that it lost its leading man. Skarsgård has to be anxious for True Blood to wrap given the movie offers coming his way.
Ultra Culture the exhaustive list of Xavier Dolan's credits... in his own movies.
Xavier Dolan ...oh and he's started film #5
Pajiba has an awesome take down of the recent resurgence of "boohoo it's hard to do female characters" quotes and articles -- I can't even with those comments from the animators of Frozen!

Popcorn Taxi Tom Hiddleston doing Owen Wilson doing Loki. wtf? (and also LOL)
Coming Soon Netflix has ordered a new family secrets thriller series from the creators of Damages
Variety Paul Rudd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are said to be Marvel's top choices for upcoming superhero flick Ant-Man
Variety Weird. Susan Sarandon and Eva Amurri may star in a mother/daughter sitcom. I can't say I predicted a sitcom for Sarandon and isn't "Mom" already on TV?
i09 the weirdest vampire movies ever made
The Playlist new images and clip from 12 Years a Slave 
MNPP 250 words or less on Captain Phillips 

my favorite Best Actress win of the 1970sFinally...
Movie Mezzanine seemingly asked everyone but me to compile their "top ten" of the 1970s without commentary. I dont know why lists without commentary are fun to read but they are. It's fun to see which movies dominated their massive roundup (The Godfather is the expected winner, topping 6 lists and it's nearest rivals - more interesting -- are tied for 3 #1 ranks each:Annie Hall, Days of Heaven and Taxi Driver). I've already done this particular top ten in an earlier post but if I were to redo it it'd maybe look like so. And weirdly no one they polled had my #1 as #1 though it appears on a few lists. 

1) Manhattan 2) Nashville 3) Cabaret 4) Apocalypse Now
5) Network 6) All That Jazz 7) Carrie 8) Taxi Driver 9) Annie Hall
10) Dog Day Afternoon 11) Cries and Whispers 12) The Conversation
13) Three Women 14) Jaws 15) The Godfather 16) The Way We Were
17) Klute 18) McCabe and Mrs Miller 19) Star Wars
and 20) Grease (for the nostalgia. shut it)

Okay I cheated with a top twenty but the astonishing thing about that decade is that everyone's lists look completely reasonable because great films can be seen wherever you choose to look in your 70s film education. You know? 

Exit Music
How about a little "Chopsticks" with Oscar bound (again) mega-stars Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock? So crazy that today's new adults (Happy 18th, 1995 babies!) were born into a world where Hanks and Bullock were ruling the box office and today here we are again. Talk about legs (and I don't mean Bullock's literal ones but wow those gams)

Thursday
Oct102013

The many faces of Tom Hanks

It’s Tim, here on the eve of Captain Phillips getting released for all the world to enjoy, to ponder the career of its star Tom Hanks. For this movie (and Saving Mr. Banks later in the year, to lesser degree) represents a kind of comeback, for a movie star that never seemed like he needed one; and yet the buzzy, well-received thriller is lining up to be the first largely successful vehicle that Hanks has had in years. Larry Crowne sank without a trace; Angels & Demons impressed nobody and was hardly a “Tom Hanks movie” in the first place. And that already puts us more than half a decade in the past. An odd fate for the man who seemed so unavoidable in the ‘90s and into the ‘00s.

But anyway, 2013 is shaping up to be a big year for the actor, so what better opportunity to look back over some of the best performances of an actor who, though he always seems to regress to an everyday nice fella stock type, has boasted a bit more shading and nuance than that. These are my picks for some of Hanks’s best work – and no, you won’t see either of his Oscar-winning roles here.

Early, wacky comedies
Having made his name in the world of TV sitcoms, it’s hardly shocking that virtually all of Hanks’s big screen roles in the 1980s were an extension of the broadly amusing, family-friendly material that he’d worked with there. The best of these roles, by far, is as the adult incarnation of Josh Baskin in Big, the iconic Penny Marshall film about a preteen who wishes to grow up and does so overnight. Concepts don’t come much higher, nor comedy much less edgy, than that, and yet the film hasn’t lost an ounce of its charm despite a quarter of a century in which its goofiness could have easily been reduced to kitsch.

Almost all of its success relies on Hanks, who happily resists from playing up the most obvious elements of the part (can you imagine circa-’88 Robin Williams in the part? Yeesh). Instead, he plays the part weirdly straight, keeping a childish sense of confusion just close enough to temper the childlike wonder, and finding comedy through being honest to the character, instead of mugging.

Romantic comedies
Two of the films that paired Hanks with Meg Ryan are generally regarded as, if not “classics”, appealing time-wasters. But it’s the first and most obscure, Joe Versus the Volcano from 1990, that gets my pick as the best, and even more as the best work Hanks himself did in the trio. It’s half black comedy, half cartoon, and extensively reliant on having a rock-steady everyman in the middle to anchor its whimsies. This may in fact be the first movie to extensively and successfully trade on Hanks’s “Heck, I’m just a middle American guy like everyone else” persona, and undoubtedly my favorite of all the roles where he played that aspect up. It’s not incredibly sophisticated or probing, but it’s exactly what the film requires, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing it better.

Earnest Oscarbait
Back-to-back Oscars couldn’t translate into a third consecutive nomination for Apollo 13, but compared to the breast-beating Importance of his work in Philadelphia (he’s not even my pick for best male lead of that film, let alone that year), and the aggressively corny hero of Forrest Gump, I absolutely find his portrayal of real-life astronaut Cmdr. James Lovell to be much more rewarding, if only because it is more human-sized. The trademark Hanks friendliness is in full bloom here, leavened by the character’s prickly military background, and both come out frequently in the more domestic early part of the film, but the most impressive acting all comes after the titular vessel has entered disaster movie territory, and Hanks has to play both mortal terror for the audience and the denial of mortal terror for the other actors, and a palpable sense of loss that underlines both. Apparently, playing regular folk stressing out about being adrift in space brings out the best in all sorts of actors.

Elder statesman
I think it was Saving Private Ryan – the first of three performances for Steven Spielberg – that pushed Hanks from affable leading man to beloved cottage industry, and the movies he made in its wake have a tendency to be a bit more idiosyncratic than the ones before. Though unlike many actors hitting their “interesting work for interesting directors” phase, Hanks never moved too terribly far away from crowd-pleasers (except for the Coen brothers film The Ladykillers, one of those movies for which the word “interesting” takes on an especially euphemistic tone). The showiest of these roles, but also the most accomplished, was as the anchor of Robert Zemeckis’s one-man show Cast Away, where Hanks not only had to keep our attention for two hours virtually alone, he had to suggest his character’s gradual descent into isolation-driven madness in a way that was still fun to watch. Because Hollywood dross or not, nobody wants to see a Zemeckis/Hanks picture with a serious depiction of madness. Plus, it’s due entirely to his efforts that a volleyball has one of the most heartbreaking death scenes of the 2000s, and if that’s not terrific movie star acting, I don’t know what to call it.

So those are mine – what are your favorite Tom Hanks performances? Share with us in comments!