Marathoning Tom Hanks Movies

Isn't Tom Hanks amazing? To get through the surprisingly chilly week we have been watching Tom Hanks films. There are some spoilers for Cast Away and Captain Phillips later in this article so be warned.

This started with watching The Da Vinci Code instead of Silence Of The Lambs due to the absence of it on Netflix - definitely a tonal change there! We then finished the Robert Langdon series of films by watching Angels & Demons and Inferno.

Now to be honest here, these films aren't the greatest despite the inclusion of Tom. The Da Vinci Code was the best of the bunch and it goes quickly downhill from there.  Despite this they are enjoyable and Angels & Demons includes a book vandalism scene that very unexpectedly shocked me to my very core and I'm still not over it.

To make up for our disappointing choice to watch some bad Tom Hanks movies we resolved to finish the week by watching some good ones. I had never seen Cast Away and with it's recent addition to Netflix it seemed the perfect time to rectify that.

It was a really enjoyable experience and it has provoked a number of discussions since. I personally think that after four years on an island I would be incredibly bored but my partner maintains you would have so much stuff to keep up with that you would just always be on the go leaving no time left to get bored with. We do agree that he returns to normalcy incredibly quickly at the end though, where four weeks after being rescued he is casually having parties and expecting to go back to work. I imagine in real life the experience would be so traumatic that it would be years before you could reintegrate into society.

Next we watched Captain Phillips which was my personal favourite of the films we saw last week. It was a gripping story from start to end and Tom Hanks was absolutely incredible in it. I found myself sympathising with the Somalian pirates depicted and their naivety of the situation that found themselves in. Everybody knew it wouldn't end up well for them once the Navy were involved but I still hoped they would see sense. At the end of the film we agreed that Tom Hanks did one of the most convincing portrayals of shock that we have seen in a film so hats off to him for that.

To round it up we ended on Philadelphia. Tom Hanks absolutely knocked it out of the park in this one and his best actor academy award is 100% justified.

All in all, the past week of Hanks has been thoroughly enjoyable and it makes me want to pick someone else and do a similar marathon. Any suggestions?