I went Hanks/Hanks, surprisingly enough.
Sticking w Gump, barely over Shawshank, a mile over Pulp Fiction. A few folks called me Gump around here early on, when my stories touched unbelievability. But i in fact knew Leno before he broke, saw Jimmy Carter's penis, had Keith Richards call out my name like "Norm!" at a party after only having met him once years before, have a director cousin whose films have received 30 Oscar noms, had eight women "given" to me for a night's pleasure by one of the Little Feat entourage and indeed spent a weekend with Tom Hanks when he came to Albq with the Happy Days softball team. So there.
One of my favorite films is Little Big Man, which uses an odd series of coincidences to tell the story of the Wild West. The first novel i ever attempted was about a French courtesan whose 30some years of sexual liaisons, from Louis XV thru Napoleon, told the story of the French Revolution. Forrest Gump tells an accidental history of its time that captures the modern spirit of American life much better than an intentional history ever could. Add to that a wonderful, if corny, central performance and a compelling love story (that my own wife was a pretty blonde peripatetic molestee drug addict who was dying of cancer when this came out might have made that more personally compelling) and i surrender.
I'm a Kennedy kid, a Boston Irish child of the 60s. That means i'm Unicef generous and NASA wonderstruck. So space gets me when they get it right from 2001 to the Martian. Apollo 13's a hella story, hella told and speaks to the kid who woke up @ 4am for EVERY space launch, quit Scouts for Civil Air Patrol as soon as i turned 12, intended getting my PPL before my driver's license until i ran away from home and wanted Air Force Academy over everything until Tet. Never watched no John Wayne movies, nor Stallone or Schwarzenegger neither, but Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon & Gary Sinise gave me a hero hard-on that wouldn't quit in a bit of beautifully tense storytelling. I've kept the earth steady in my window ever since. nufced