Tom Tom Club

Forgive me for asking an apparently stupid question, but exactly what the hell has everyone got against Tom Hanks? From the days of Bachelor Party (the only film which Tom regrets making), every earnest film geek has seemingly felt it their divine duty to diss Hanks at every possible opportunity. So, in Splash he was 'a wet squib'; in Big he was 'a big baby'; in Philadelphia he was a 'straight man's caricature of a gay man' … etc etc. When Hanks made an ass of himself at the Oscars a few years ago by getting all incoherently teary accepting an award ("Emotion is a constant moving at the speed of light …"), that painfully right-on pain in the arse Ben Elton decided to use his words as the starting point of a novel ('Popcorn') about the evils of cinema. When Iain Softley's underrated K-PAX opened in cinemas last week, the most damning insult anyone could think of to hurl at it was that it was 'Forrest Gump from Space' - the implication being that Kevin Spacey's performance was no better than one of Tom's. And when (horror of horrors) that highbrow cinema aficionado Mark Cousins dedicated an entire 'Scene By Scene' program to Hanks' work, self-righteous film geeks across the country could be heard complaining that Cousins (a genuine hero in my book) had 'lost the plot' or 'sold out'. Bah! Humbug!