As some late Sunday evening telly I watched Cast Away last night (BBC1), the Tom Hanks opus where one ends up empathising more with a hapless Wilson basketball than Mr. Method Actor himself.
Cast Away tells the not true story of a Fed Ex manager who lives by the clock who has a big plane crash and washes up on a desert island where, get this, he has loads of time! Tom Hanks is Chuck Noland, a Fed Ex company man through and through, pager in one hand this man thinks, breathes, godammit sweats Fedex. And he's all wrapped up in chunkiest knitwear highlighting his equally chunky frame. He's such a company man that when his pager goes he leaves his big family Christmas dinner because he absolutely must fly to wherever in a Fed Ex Tristar. So this guys a real can-do kinda guy. We see him shouting at his Muscovite employees, and we see him shouting at them in Red Square as they do an impromptu open air Fed-Ex parcel sort to make the last flight out. The next time he's shouting because coconuts are falling off the trees. More of that later. Back to Fed Ex because you can't move for Fed Ex in this film. Its omnipresent. There are even some postal jokes. 'Take 5 days to get there and we'll be US Mail' and 'you wanna be on time fly UPS!' says the pilot of the doomed plane. The crash is karma for his irony. The ironies on him as all the parcels are late so he may as well be US Mail. There are loads of laughs here. They keep on coming when Chuck Noland has his fateful crash where everyone dies except him. Indeed he doesn't suffer a scratch. He's then washed ashore on a South Pacific island. What to do next? He doesn't find any water for a day which was a nice touch, and he eats a coconut. He find a torch on a dead pilot, and cuts his feet and hands and legs on coral and doesn't get infected. Its amazing. Its as though he has antibiotics or something to ward of the sickeningly rapid infection that usually occurs in the tropics from untreated coral cuts. You see coral is often living when it cuts your skin, and then it gets in the wound, and the air is hot and moist and before you know it your foot is the size of, for want of comparison, Wilson.
Not Chuck. He's so confident in his natural healing process that he uses some bubble wrap as a dressing and his legs don't drop off and he can still walk and doesn't get gangrene. The bubble wrap comes from the parcels washed up on the beach. And as this is a non-stop thrill fest we just can't wait to see what's in the parcels. There's Wilson the ball that becomes his best mate, and some ice skates that form a cutting/dental tool and a ballroom dress with a mesh ideal for fishing (who'd have thought) and ice skates! Ice Skates! On a desert island… but they look sharp and… and then when we watch him trying to light a fire for 10 minutes (36 hours in the film).
Four Years Later – and he's Stig of the Dump, and all that chunkiness is now skinny, and he has a caveman beard and curly hair. Ha-ha! His cave is daubed with neanderthal paintings and what-not. All in all he's regressed quite a way.
In the end he builds a raft, and loses Wilson (oh no, I ruined the one interesting plot line) and obviously gets rescued. In a nice twist his wife has remarried and had a child and so that relationship is dead. But this is a Robert Zemickis film so you just know there's some schmaltz coming up. You see good ole Chuck didn't open all the parcels on the beach. No, he was a good employee and kept one sealed and the thought of delivering it 'kept him alive for four years'. Any sane man would have opened it. After all, there could have been a solar powered satellite phone in it which would have saved us all a load of bother.
So in the final frame he's delivered the phone to some bird we saw at the beginning of the film who's a sculptor who coincidentally created a sculpture just like the logo of Fed Ex and incredibly didn't infringe their copyright. Chuck sees this and likes what he sees and he's now standing on a crossroads literally in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do next though hints have been dropped that he'll be heading back up the dusty track to the sculptress who we know is divorced because we saw her Fed Exing her divorce papers at the beginning of the film which like the beginning of this sentence really does feel like it was four and a half years ago.
Oliver Reed made a film called Castaway which was much better. It was based on a true story and that true story may have been written by Oliver Reed. I can't remember really, it doesn't really matter but the point was that Oliver Reed's character created the perfect Oliver Reed Desert Island, not unlike a Mid-Life Crisis Blue Lagoon. He put up an advert for single women to come and live with him on a desert island he owned in the South Pacific and not only did he get responses but they were hot too. Oliver Reed ends up running a South Pacific fiefdom where he drinks rum all day and the women, who either loathe him or just despise him, hang around with their knockers out.
Cast Away is rubbish and Castaway is also rubbish but Castaway has the benefit of Oliver Reed and female tits and Cast Away has Tom Hanks as a caveman. It's a no brainer really. (Look there's a nipple on the video cover!)
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