The Year of Hanks

"There are people demonstrating outside our building! Black people with basketballs! You're putting everyone at risk!" I came into this knowing little to nothing about this movie. I'd heard the title before, and it probably stuck in my head at some point because it's a catchy sort of title and I wasn't really clear on what it meant. To be honest, I had no idea Tom Hanks was in it; I honestly didn't know about any of the A‑listers who make up the cast. There's probably a very good reason for that, but I'll get to it in a bit. The events unfold through the narration of one Peter Farrow (a very Moonlighting -esque Bruce Willis), who is shown at the very beginning of the film to be a highly successful, if perpetually drunk, author. He arrives at a ritzy gala to promote his novel, The Real McCoy and the Forgotten Lamb , where he is fawned over by PR reps, the press, and the public at large. In voiceover, Farrow begins to tell the story of h...

"I hate cul-de-sacs. There's only one way out, and the people are kind of weird." A quiet street. An average neighborhood. On the surface, things appear to be quite normal. But there's trouble brewing beneath the glossy veneer of the cul-de-sac on Mayfield Place. Oh, if that isn't an extended metaphor, I don't know what is. To my recollection, I've only seen this movie once before, and I'm not positive I even saw it the whole way through. I didn't recall anything remarkable about it, but I was eager to give it a fresh view. Hanx plays Ray Peterson, a suburban family man (his first role of the kind, one that he almost didn't take for fear it would limit the kinds of roles he could play in the future) who, despite the protests of his wife Carol (Carrie Fisher), decides to spend his vacation puttering around the house. It's at this time that Ray notices something off about the eccentric Klopek family who have just moved in nex...

"How long has this dog been bleeding?" "Not long enough!" I've been anxiously awaiting this one for the entire Hanks season (Hankstide?). I don't recall whether someone asked me specifically what my favorite Hanx film was, or if I posed the question to myself, but it didn't take me much thought to decide on Turner & Hooch. It's not the most obvious choice. It's not one of his biggest hits or deepest roles, but it really is a lot of fun.  Hanx once again steps into the polished Oxfords of a police detective (oops,  investigator ) that he last donned in  Dragnet . Only this time, the character he portrays is pretty much the polar opposite of Pep Streebek. Matter-of-fact, compulsively neat, procedure-driven Scott Turner would probably hate Pep Streebek, or at the very least find him impossible to live with. Turner is Joe Friday with just a little less procedural gravitas and a little more humor - he does an impeccable job of steaming...