I love this man! Tom Hanks has got to be one of my favorite actors to ever appear on any screen! With how much I love him I am a little shocked that I decided that I was going to watch all of his movies. The reason I am so shocked was because I love old movie and old actors. There were a few reasons why I ultimately picked Tom Hanks.
It was summer of last year, 2017, that I was thinking about what I was going to do this year. I already decided that I was going to do my year of courage but that was going to be once a month and I really wanted to watch more movies. I was on facebook when a story came up about a young woman who sent Mr. Hanks a letter and she got a reply back rather quickly. He was so nice in the letter and I admired him for it. In the article it had said that he was really good about replying to his fans that write him a letter. I thought it would be cool to do that but I wouldn't know what to write to him about really. Not long after that, a video started to re-circulate on my facebook page. It's a wonderful video of Tom Hanks with James Corden doing snippets of all of Tom Hanks' movies in the "Role Call" skit.
After those two things I realized that as much as I love Tom Hanks it's crazy that I haven't seen that many of his movies. Now, I have seen all the Toy Story movies, I am a 90's baby after all, and Forrest Gump is my 7th favorite movie of time. Other movies like Big I still have never seen.
The other reason that hit home with me watching all of his movies is because one of his movies got me through a hard time in my life. In April of 2016 I came home from church to find my mom sitting out in front of the house. It was one of those things that didn't seem out of the ordinary, however, you had this feeling that something was wrong. I sat down and my mom had to tell me that my 22 year old cousin, Dean, had died in a car accident during the previous night.
My family had just gone through the loss of my grandmother not a month before and now we had to work through another death that came out of no where. Dean and I were not very close but we did love each other. The last time I saw him was a few years before at his father's funeral. We had a good talk, and talked about happy times and good memories. We hugged told each other and said that we loved each other. That was the last time I would ever see him. I am glad that I had that moment. I am glad that we were brought together one last time before he was gone. I am glad I got to tell him I loved him.
However, the week leading up to his death is something I will always regret. All that week I kept getting a feeling to message Dean on Facebook and tell him how awesome he was, and how proud of him I was, and that his dad and my Grandma would be proud too. I never got around to it...
Learning about his death is the worst pain I have ever felt in my life. The depth of sorrow that I experienced when he died has been something that no other sorrow has come close to. I spent the rest of the day dreading coming near my dad because my dad was getting updates about what happened, how it happened, and I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to go to any movie, even though that was originally the game plan, because I wasn't holding it together at home very well. I didn't want to go out in public and try to "act normal". After a while though, I could not take being in my house. There was too much going on inside my head! I had too many emotions happening that I could not process at once and something had to be done!
I got in my car bought a ticket for Tom Hanks' film A Hologram for the King.
I was really hoping it was going to be a comedy when I went. I knew it wasn't but I really hoped. This movie I haven't seen since that day in the theater. Since the day Dean died. However, this movie helped me with the grieving process. No, no one dies in this movie but it does have a lot of emotion. A lot of questioning "where do I belong" and "how do I fit in here" and also "do I make a difference". It was a lot of searching to become yourself in this movie. It not a easy journey either. This movie really asked the question "who am I" and went on a beautifully hard journey to get there. It dealt with a wide range of emotions in a growing period of this man's life and in watching all of these emotions on screen it helped me to pick apart, and work through, all the emotions I was dealing with in that moment in the movie theater.
I don't think I can thank Tom Hanks enough for choosing to do this movie and it helping me so much.
After realizing how much Tom Hanks has impacted my life I really wanted to see all of his work. First, I had to thank him.
So, I finally decided to write him a letter.
I wrote to him about everything I put in this blog and how awesome I think he is. I wrote like 4 drafts of the letter cause I couldn't get it right! This is the first time I have ever wrote fan mail and it had to be right! I sent it to him on New Year's Day to start the year off. I don't know if I will get a letter back but I know that I will write him again at the end of the year and tell him what I think.
I am not 100% sure what I am going to think of all his movies but I know it's going to be a fun experience either way! I will have a ball doing to the movie hustle with Tom Hanks!
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