I was gonna do a writeup but this author sums up my thoughts pretty well. I always hated how the movie portrayed Jenny. It’s like the movie tries to punish her for daring to move against the broader (white, patriarchal, militaristic, conservative) culture. Notice how she only receives redemption when she functionally gives up her counter-cultural ways and accepts her role as a mom. And even then she still gets “punished” for her “sins” by dying of AIDS like it’s some Grimm fairy tale. Feels a bit like incel fan-fiction, in hindsight.
And of course the movie panders to white reactionary notions of the Black Panthers. They were just angry black men who were reverse racists. Gross.
Forrest Gump is incredibly reactionary and it’s terrible. It’s the conservative boomers’ attempt to tell a morality tale in which they are the ultimate victors over their contemporaries who dared for something different.
Right, in the original, he did a secret mission for NASA and crash landed on an island of cannibals or someshit (still was questionable, in different ways from the film).
The film stole Forrest Gump’s soul, he was a character with flaws, not just a saintly Murican observer, when he fucked up life quickly turned to kick his ass. He also swore on like every page, fucked all the time and smoked dope with Lt. Dan (who was a manipulative bastard). That’s what got me the most, they turned a mildly anti-war novel into an outright pro-war one.