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Cast Away

Cast Away

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Guilgan's Ishland 2000
Review: Chuck Nowland (Tom Hanks) is a federal express agent. Chuck never gets to speand time with his girlfriend Kelly (Helen Hunt). Chuck is called away on bussiness on christmas eve. Chuck and Kelly have to exchange gifts in the car and Chuck gives her a box with supposely a wedding ring in it and tells Kelly to hold on to it. Chuck gets on the plane and the plane has trouble and goes down somewhere in the atlantic. Chuck is the only survivor. He finds land and tries to get food but it is hard when there is none! Chuck is finding boxes from the wrekage and in one of those boxes is a volleyball. Chuck puts a blood stain on the ball and names it "Wilson". Chuck and Wilson have some very deep conversations. It is four years later now and Chuck is an expert at catching fish. Chuck also lookes like ZZtop only about 50 pounds. Chuck fiannaly decides to make a raft and attempt to get off the island. After getting out to sea Chuck loses Wilson it is the most dramatic sceen in the movie. A whale squirts water on him when a boat is going by and he gets picked up. It is four weeks later and Chuck is all cleaned up and Fed Ex has a cermony four him. Chuck finnaly gets to see Kelly again only to find out that she is married and has a kid. They both figure out in that rain scene that they can never be together again. Chuck is left at the crossroads literaly.
The 2-disc dvd set has a ton of great extras. But the extras and Tom Hanks briallant perfomance can't make this movie what it shouls be. I had a lot of questions after wacthing this movie like "Why was Kelly screeming Jack when running down her drivway his name was Chuck!", and "How Chuck he her screeming he was down the street?", also "How could a whale save Chuck wouldn't the whale eat him?", also "Why did Chuck talk to a volleyball?", another is "What happenes to Chuck in the end?". It is hard for a movie to be good when the supporting character is an inanimate object!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Incredible, symbolic, Hanks' best film!!
Review: This movie can be viewed from different levels. On the outside, the film is a great survival story of a man stranded on an uninhabitated island. Chuck Noland, the main character played by Tom Hanks, finds several inventive ways to live off the land, and the viewer is brought into the film by observing Noland's actions and tactics in confronting the sobering isolation.

On a deeper level, this movie deals with some moving themes, expressed through powerfully symbolic methods. In the first part of the movie, Chuck Noland (whose name is also metaphorical)is a top "Federal Express" employee obsessed with racing against time. Time is a major idea that permeates throughout the entire feature, and symbols of time appear and reappear. Noland's outlook on time changes as the movie progresses. In the end, he has to deal with what fate has dictated to him. Hanks compelling performance in the concluding scenes is moving and captivating. I have heard some complain about the ending of the film, but for me this was the most essential part of the entire piece. For me, it presented a metaphorical situation that represents a point that, in different ways, everyone faces at sometime in life. I feel that only top movies should be issued into the home library, and CAST AWAY is definitely one of them.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Over two hours? I don't believe it!
Review: Never has a two hour movie seemed so short! When it ended I wanted more. What happens next? What was in that package?!!!!

To sum the plot up briefly, this is the story of a time obsessed man whose plane goes down. He is stranded on an island alone. He suddenly has nothing but time. Hanks's character is likeable and, we soon find out, very resourceful. Excellent story of survival. Tom Hanks turns in another great performance.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Jans
Review: I thought the movie was a little slow. The most exciting part was his relationship with Wilson. Still, a good movie.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent
Review: The story is about a FedEx employee (Tom Hanks), who is a workaholic. On one of his trips, he is on an airplane that crashes in the Pacific. After quite a long ordeal, time, as well as ice (and a number of other things we take for granted) has a new meaning to him.

Even though this was a fairly long movie ( 2 hour plus), you really don't notice it. The story told was great. Who would have thought that a movie with a volleyball as a main character would be so good. Tom Hanks did an excellent job of playing his character.

This movie is well worth seeing.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Listen up Nitwits!
Review: The meaning to this movie CAST AWAY is about having a destiny..that is what the movie is about. Hanks character "Chuck" goes away, gets in a plane crash, opens up every FEDEX package EXCEPT 1, is trapped for 4 LONG YEAR on a island, then the girl he loves gets married as he finds out on his arrival home, he is sad and wished he did not care so much about work..cause then he would have never went on the flight...etc...Still there...then he delivered the 1 PACKAGE he kept from the trip and SURPRISE he meets a beautiful women who anyone with a brain figures is his soulmate..sans....DESTINY!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I CAST YOU OUT!
Review: If anybody rents or buys this movie I will personally slap you! Stupid, boring, slow, pathetic, idiotic, I could go on.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Hanks' performance almost makes this a great movie
Review: "Cast Away" is, if nothing else, an example of how one great performance can almost lift a so-so film. In this case, the great performance is turned in by Tom Hanks, and it's a dandy.

Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a Federal Express employee who's obsessed with time. We inhabit Noland's go-go world for a time, starting with one terrific sequence in which he's trying to sell Russians on the virtues of being on time - no mean feat with Russians.

We meet his girlfriend (Helen Hunt), a sweet woman who has to compete with Noland's job for affection (she gives him a conductor's pocket watch for Christmas, and he says he'll always keep it on home time).

All of this changes when Noland hops a Federal Express plane for a business trip to the South Pacific. The flight gets lost, then the plane is forced to ditch in the Pacific. After fighting to escape the burning, sinking plane, and struggling to survive in typhoon-racked seas, Noland finds himself stranded on a deserted, hardscrapple island. He instinctively reaches for his pager...and it's dead.

Suddenly, the man who is ruled by the clock has nothing but time. Hanks' transformation from helpless castaway to hardened survivor (and back to a civilized man after he's rescued) is alternately funny, sad, triumphant, and downbeat. He can say more with a facial expression, or body movement, than most actors can with brilliant dialogue.

The sequences in which Hanks tries to survive on the desert island are by far the strongest pieces of "Cast Away," and taken alone, they're brilliant. Unfortunately, the bookends of the castaway story - the time before Noland is stranded and after he is rescued - don't even begin to approach the power of the island sequences.

For starters, once Noland's rescued, he wants above all to see his old girlfriend; unfortunately, in the intervening years, she has written him off for dead (as she should have), and she's married with kids. Director Robert Zemeckis - no stranger to schmaltzy relationships - toys with the audience briefly by suggesting they might get back together, but the mere idea of it is beyond silly, and thankfully, it's never consummated. The two characters are not the same two people who existed before Nolan was lost, after all.

But the mere idea of these two reuniting is so silly to begin with that Zemeckis is foolish for even entertaining it. Better to have cut that one off at the root, and had Noland start his journey of rediscovery. I also wish that Hunt would have been given more of a character to work with; she's basically stuck in a "loving housewife" mode, but we don't know what makes her tick, and I didn't see many sparks between her and Hanks.

Like all Zemeckis' movies, "Cast Away" is technically brilliant, but the island sequences challenge Zemeckis' usual hyperactive visual style; after all, how do you do "Back To The Future" camera moves on a desert island? Zemeckis compensates by adding other sensory stimulation - namely, sound - to the largely static camera shots to give us a kinetic sense of place.

Overall, "Cast Away" is very much worth seeing, if for nothing else than Hanks' brilliant performance and the raw power of the desert island scenes. It's too bad that these pieces didn't make a better whole.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Thoroughly Enjoyable and Entertaining!
Review: I can't say this boosts my confidence in air travel, however, CAST AWAY is thoroughly entertaining! For those who want to experience what it feels like to go through a plane crash, I suggest investing in tactile trandsducers for your Home theater! The movie itself is another Tom Hanks success.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Somewhat trite... not worth the time investment.
Review: The trailer of this film does more of a job spoiling the film than any review could do, so if you've seen that, there's going to be little to surprise you in the film's 2 1/2 hour running time.

The main thing missing here would be a realistic resolution of the relationship between Hunt & Hanks characters (we're told she's been through a lot of pain, but we don't really see it... there would be wounds on both sides caused by the idealizations of each other that are completely ignored). The whole film is really a setup for Hanks' return to society, but that's the part of the film that gets least developed. Instead, we get Tom Hanks as a Boy Scout becoming one with nature (culminating in a truly embarassing moment in which a whale swims up to Hanks and winks at him.)

During his stint on the island, Hanks implausibly talks to Wilson, a volleyball. This might sound refresingly quirky, but for me it was awful (at the very least the moment where Hanks snaps & talks to him the 1st time was unbelievable). The film never really explores any of the psychological issues that a man that does such things must surely have.

The first 20 minutes of the film were awful, with Tom Hanks being the prototypical idealized American (bringing Elvis to the Russians, saving them from their own inefficiency, etc..) The casting of Tom Hanks appears to be the film's major characterization. The guy's obsessed with time, and loves his fiancé, but what else do we know about him? We're expected to assume he's an everyman solely by the typecasting of Hanks.

Those are all pretty major concerns in my book... I didn't HATE it, but it's hardly a success. I think that Cast Away spends roughly half its time off the island. It would be nice if the film actually created a believeable set of developed characters for Hanks to interact with when he was off the island. I don't
think there are any decent characters in the film.

What *did* work for me was the decent direction, and the basic narrative. There's something inherently compelling about the situation, even if the movie screwed up on the specifics... I guess my basic complaint is that I've seen Fearless & The Sweet Hereafter, etc... , which deal with this sort of thing in a much better, more realistic manner. A traumatic event like this has wide-ranging emotional effects. Those interest me a lot more than how someone opens a coconut with a rock.


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