Tom Hanks has been around Hollywood long enough to do it all, from cross-dressing sitcoms to period piece Oscar wins. Which means that for every new classic, there's a movie where the dog got equal billing. These were tough lists to make, because there are more than five good ones, and more than five bad ones. (The Da Vinci Code just missed out ... I'll let you guess.)
Top Five
1. Saving Private Ryan
Hanks turns in a great performance as the CO of a handful of Army Rangers sent to pick up the last survivor of four brothers. After opening with 24 minutes of the hell of the Normandy invasion of 1944, the movie shifts gears, following the squad as it goes deep into France and the men fight, die, and squabble over leadership. It leans on the heartstrings a bit, but the action and the group dynamics are fantastic.
2. Philadelphia
Even in 1993 gay men in big Hollywood movies were mostly swishy sidekicks and hi-larious queens, and AIDS was still taboo. So it was actually pretty brave for a successful comedic actor to gamble on a role as a gay lawyer suing the company that fired him because he had AIDS. Hanks had played serious parts before, but this is the one that cemented him as a dramatic force, and won him his first Oscar.
3. Big
There had already been kid-to-grownup switcheroo movies, and there would be many, many more. But 1988's Big, wedged right between Hanks-the-wacky-guy-who-did-Splash and Hanks-the-serious-actor-who-did-Philadelphia, is the best. Utterly believable as a boy trapped in a man's body, he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar and won a Golden Globe.
4. Cast Away
This ends up being two movies in one, and both are good. After a terrifyingly shot plane crash, workaholic FedEx analyst Hanks ends up shipwrecked, the only survivor. He carves out a Robinson Crusoe-style life, and makes a friend out of a volleyball. When he finally gets back to civilization, the film switches tacks; life, including his fiancée has moved on without him, and he has to figure out his place in a strange world.
5. Charlie Wilson's War
The true-life role of a hard-partying congressman who finds a cause in Afghani freedom fighters is Hanks at his best -- sly, likable, cynical, and a little more complicated than he looks. There's a great performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Julia Roberts even manages not to do that big fake laugh.
Honorable Mention:Bachelor Party
I can't honestly say this was better than anything in my Top Five (or than, say, Apollo 13). But this landmark in teen sleaze, costarring Tawny Kitaen and Adrian Zmed, is an '80s classic. Where else will you find a two-time Oscar winner, a Chippendale dancer called Meat, and a donkey show where the donkey ODs? (I also love Bosom Buddies.)
Bottom Five
I feel like a heel for even bringing it up, everyone says he's such a good guy. But Hanks has made some very bad movies. And sorry, but Forrest Gump is one of them.
1. The Money Pit
Hanks stars with Shelley Long, at the brief pinnacle of her post-Cheers career, playing a couple who buy a house that starts falling apart as soon as they move in. The repairs that were supposed to take two weeks take four months, and they find a raccoon in the dumbwaiter! Hilarious. And Yakov Smirnoff's in it. "In Russia, bad movie laughs at you!" Believe it or not this is a remake of a 1948 classic, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy's Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. As it happens, so was Ice Cube's Are We Done Yet? What do you say we leave the original alone for a while?
2. Turner and Hooch
In a year with not one but two cop-and-his-dog movies, this managed to be marginally better than Jim Belushi's K-9. But really, is "marginally better than Jim Belushi" something you want on your resume? In the end Hanks marries the vet, played by Mare Winningham, and when their dogs have puppies, one looks like Hooch. How Lady and the Tramp.
3. Volunteers
Hanks plays an arrogant playboy on the run from gambling debts who scams his way into the Peace Corps and ends up in Thailand. Laffs are sure to follow, because it's the '60s, and the U.S. is bogged down in Vietnam right around the corner! Will the spoiled rich kid find his heart (yes), get the girl (yes), and defeat the communists (yes)? Throw in a bizarre transformation from '60s satire to action movie, and this added up to a massive Cold War dud.
4. Forrest Gump
It was a massive hit, and Hanks won his second Oscar for it. But I just couldn't get over that shticky accent, and the whole coincidental shaping of history gimmick feels stagey and forced as soon as it starts. And those lines -- "Life is like a box of chocolates," "Stupid is as stupid does" -- little nuggets of cornpone folksyism born to be slapped on a t-shirt at the airport gift shop. And, it spawned a line of fake down-home crappy restaurants. I know, it's your favorite movie. I hope we can still be friends.
5. You've Got Mail
As lonely souls who may or may not find each other (come on, of course they will) Hanks and Meg Ryan had already made this movie three years earlier, for the same director, when it was Sleepless in Seattle. This time around AOL takes over the techno-cupid role from call-in radio. They email flirt but hate each other in real life, until they finally fall in love and then -- ta-daa! -- discover that they'd already been dating through the magic of a terrible ISP. A more egregious example of product placement would be hard to find (at least until Hanks and Ryan meet again in 2012's Clap on, Clap off, also to be directed by Nora Ephron).
Film.com's FREE movie of the week is "Love the Hard Way." Oscar-winner Adrien Brody and Charlotte Ayanna star in this drama about a thief who falls for a curious, beautiful young woman. As their intimacy grows, a slick cop (Pam Greer) is closing in.
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