Cast Away (2000): When you think about the 90s and early 00s, you think about peak Tom Hanks territory. He was a global superstar and his movies were cultural flagpoles. So it made sense and it was perfectly excusable to set up this 2+ hour one-man-show advertorial to FedEx. Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a hard-working FedEx manager, whose Christmas work emergency gets him stranded on an island in the Pacific. There, he somehow survives the unlikeliest of odds, before (spoiler) somehow escaping four years later, only to be confronted with the reality that the world has moved on without him. Zemeckis is a bit of a fantasy guy, so this all checks out. Cast Away feels like a summary treatment, filled with make-belief and conceptual-abstractions of what survival would look like. It has more than a handful of severely unlikely moments, but that doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t fit together well. In my mind, there was more island time than there turned out to be, but there must have been a limit to what mainstream audiences would accept even of a Tom Hanks monologue. Its existential ruminations make for Cast Away’s better moments, and the iconic Wilson volleyball turns out to be one of the most memorable props in any 2000s movie. I’m not certain it stands up very well to the test of time, as we’ve had movies both more intense and true-to-realism, and more abstract and illuminating about the experience of solitude under adverse conditions, but I think this one has the merit of being a road opener. 8
Josh Johnson: Symphony (2026): Talk about wanting to like something and just not being able to. I am a fan of JJ from his The Daily Show outings, but had never seen any of his own material, so there was some anticipation on my part to enjoy this. But as Johnson takes us through a patchwork of stories under the overarching theme of the symphony of life, I found myself struggling to be substantially amused, or enlightened. I can’t put my finger on what I thought didn’t work, but essentially the right content just wasn’t there for me and the subdued performance, while in tone with what the show was supposed to do, didn’t allow much energy to come across. 6
Normal (2025): In what is essentially a spin-off from Bob Odenkirk’s Nobody (in the same way all those Liam Neeson tough guy movies were spin-offs from Taken), we encounter American small town corruption via Yakuza, through the eyes of interim sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk). It doesn’t take itself too seriously, so that’s nice, and Odenkirk is, naturally, an easy man to go with for the lead. There are moments of over-the-top violence and some cute little twists and turns in the plot, but at the same time it felt to me that the movie wasn’t fully fleshed out. It was going for the quick wins, the visual pizzazz, the witty dismemberments, but not doing enough to root its characters. Think Hot Fuzz, minus most of the build-up and flavour. Still, I liked it enough for a genre piece and a diversion. 6
The Girl on the Train (2016): I reckon there are many elements that make TGotT a stretch, in spite of Emily Blunt’s committed performance. The criss-crossed story, spread over several months, with interconnected characters, that we patiently wait to make sense of, leaves little room for mystery. It also relies on the conceit of us accepting the people we are presented with at face value, which is the laziest of conceits, really, because it takes very little to just omit stuff to make the story “work”. There is an interesting tale underneath it all, about crippling alcohol addiction, but all the melodrama makes this hard to take seriously. The only thing that threw me off more was that someone might actually be able to get any sense of people’s lives by just ogling them for a handful of seconds while a train drives by. A disappointment. 5
Sliding Doors (1998): I wasn’t very taken with this movie when I first saw it and it has not grown on me since. Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Helen, a PR lady who has just lost her job because of questionable conduct, though she’ll put that on the patriarchy. As she heads back home, the movie takes two paths – one where she makes the underground on time and one where she doesn’t. In both, her partner is a cheating scumbag, but he only gets immediately caught in the act in one of them. One path is one of some emancipation and growth, whereas the other has Helen subjected to working two jobs to sustain her cheating partner. This is really a riff on It’s a Wonderful Life (1949), but without the insights and charisma. After all Helen is put through, the movie has the gall to kind of suggest all roads lead to Rome, which is terribly annoying. At least Serendipity doesn’t feign its ridiculousness, though I’ll put that claim to the test when I rewatch it in the coming weeks. All in all, Sliding Doors is not absolutely terrible and it juggles its two tales with some narrative dignity, but it feels like a lost opportunity. 5
tributary stu 
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