Sunday, June 08, 2008

Tom Hanks' Run

In the last 24 hours we've watched 'You've Got Mail' and 'Castaway', both on TV. (And let me give some praise to TNT here. One of my pet peeves is when they place commercials in TV versions without any feel for the movie. TNT seems to have made an effort to get away from that.) Watching them reminded me of something I'd heard about Tom Hanks having one of the most successful movie decades ever. Here's what he did from 1993-2002:
A League of Their Own
Sleepless in Seattle
Philadelphia
Forrest Gump
Apollo 13
Toy Story
That Thing You Do! (Might be my favorite on this list.)
Saving Private Ryan
You've Got Mail
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
Cast Away
Road to Perdition
Catch Me if You Can
The Terminal


That's four different Best Picture noms and two Best Actor awards. I'd bet that you saw most of these in the theater (I saw 11 of them that way). It's just an astonishing run of films. I think TNT has the rights to all of them almost all of them deserve a stop on the dial.
Tom Cruise had a pretty good run in the late 80's but it doesn't quite compare. Will Smith has a great record of high grossing movies but there have been some absolute stinkers in there ('Wild, Wild West' especially). Not sure who has taken the torch from Hanks. Russell Crowe, maybe, he doesn't have quite the volume.
Not sure we'll ever see a run like that again.

3 comments:

carrster said...

yeah - what a great list. I saw 12 in the theater! Wow. That's good for me!! I loved THAT THING YOU DO...too. But my favorite Tom Hanks' film of all time is BIG. I could watch that a million times (and probably have)

DD4 said...

I am a fan of Tom Hanks, too! I also think it's great that he and his wife have what seems to be a good, solid marriage. He/they don't seem to have let stardom go to their heads. I look forward to seeing him in more films.

There were 3 on the list that I haven't seen.

Kate said...

I'm a Tom Hanks lover myself. (And thought Castaway was amazing acting). Didn't know he'd done so much AND he stays out of the news!