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Forrest Gump Plot

The film begins in medias res with a white feather falling to the feet of Forrest Gump, who is sitting at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia. Forrest picks up the feather and puts it in the book Curious George, then tells the story of his life to a woman seated next to him. The listeners at the bus stop change regularly throughout his narration, each showing a different reaction to his narration ranging from disbelief and indifference to rapt veneration. His mother runs a boarding house in Alabama. One guest, a musician (later revealed to be Elvis Presley) picks up his own style of dancing from watching Forrest's shaky movements caused by his leg braces. To get Forrest into a normal school, Forrest's mother bribes the school's Principal with sexual favors. On his first day of school, he meets a girl named Jenny Curran, a girl who is sexually abused by her father and who becomes his life's love. One day after school, Forrest is being threatened by a group of bullies. Jenny tells him to run, and so he does, losing his leg braces in the process. His fast running ability becomes his favored method of travel, and during his senior year in high school, threatened by the same group of bullies, he runs through a football field and gets himself into college on a football scholarship playing for Paul "Bear" Bryant at the University of Alabama. He excels at football so much that he becomes an All-American, and meets President John F. Kennedy. After his college graduation, he enlists in the United States Army. In boot camp, Forrest makes friends with Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue (Mykelti Williamson), who convinces Forrest to go into the shrimping business with him when the war is over. Forrest excels in training, and after finishing boot camp, Bubba and Forrest are assigned to the same platoon in Vietnam. As soon as they arrive with their new platoon, they meet ..More The film begins in medias res with a white feather falling to the feet of Forrest Gump, who is sitting at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia. Forrest picks up the feather and puts it in the book Curious George, then tells the story of his life to a woman seated next to him. The listeners at the bus stop change regularly throughout his narration, each showing a different reaction to his narration ranging from disbelief and indifference to rapt veneration. His mother runs a boarding house in Alabama. One guest, a musician (later revealed to be Elvis Presley) picks up his own style of dancing from watching Forrest's shaky movements caused by his leg braces. To get Forrest into a normal school, Forrest's mother bribes the school's Principal with sexual favors. On his first day of school, he meets a girl named Jenny Curran, a girl who is sexually abused by her father and who becomes his life's love. One day after school, Forrest is being threatened by a group of bullies. Jenny tells him to run, and so he does, losing his leg braces in the process. His fast running ability becomes his favored method of travel, and during his senior year in high school, threatened by the same group of bullies, he runs through a football field and gets himself into college on a football scholarship playing for Paul "Bear" Bryant at the University of Alabama. He excels at football so much that he becomes an All-American, and meets President John F. Kennedy. After his college graduation, he enlists in the United States Army. In boot camp, Forrest makes friends with Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue (Mykelti Williamson), who convinces Forrest to go into the shrimping business with him when the war is over. Forrest excels in training, and after finishing boot camp, Bubba and Forrest are assigned to the same platoon in Vietnam. As soon as they arrive with their new platoon, they meet their new platoon leader, Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise). After some time in the field, during which Forrest writes regularly to Jenny, Forrest's platoon is ambushed while on patrol. Though Forrest rescues many of the men, including Dan, whose legs were severely injured and are later amputated, Bubba is killed in action, dying in Forrest's arms. Forrest is awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism during the ambush, is promoted to Sergeant, and meets President Lyndon B. Johnson at his award ceremony. After meeting Abbie Hoffman at an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., Forrest reunites with Jenny, who has been living a hippie counterculture life. He also encounters Dan, who has become a bitter alcoholic, having felt that it was his destiny to die on the battlefield, as had all his ancestors. Forrest celebrates New Year's Eve with Dan, who is initially hostile and uses Forrest as a means of obtaining alcohol. When Forrest tells of his and Bubba's plan to buy a shrimping boat, Dan mocks Forrest and sarcastically promises that he will become first mate of the ship. However, Dan later finds empathy with the fact that Forrest has been discriminated against in the past because of his perceived low I.Q., likening it to his own experience of disability. While Forrest is in recovery for a bullet wound in his "but-tox", he discovers his uncanny ability for ping-pong, eventually gaining popularity and rising to celebrity status and later playing ping-pong in China. After meeting with President Richard M. Nixon, Forrest inadvertently triggers the Watergate scandal, is honorably discharged from the army and returns home to Alabama. He finds that his mother has endorsed a company that makes ping-pong paddles, earning himself $25,000, which, after getting a new hair cut, a new suit, fancy dinner for his mother, a bus ticket and three Dr Pepper soft drinks, he uses to buy a shrimping boat, fulfilling his promise to Bubba. Dan returns to fulfill his earlier promise and becomes first mate of the boat. Forrest and Dan fail to pull in much shrimp at first, but during Hurricane Carmen, both men stay out in the middle of the ocean with the boat, which is the only shrimping boat in the area to survive. The lack of competition helps Dan and Forrest to catch huge amounts of shrimp. In the middle of the storm, Dan finally overcomes his personal demons and becomes one of Forrest's closest friends. As his business partner, Dan later invests the money in Apple Computer, and Forrest is financially secure for the rest of his life. Forrest names his company Bubba Gump (which has since inspired an actual shrimp restaurant), and gives half of the proceeds to Bubba's family. One day, Forrest is told on the radio that his mother is ill. He returns home immediately and sits down beside her. She tells him that she is going to die (of terminal cancer) and consoles him by saying it was her destiny and that they all had one destiny. She subsequently expires, on a Tuesday. One day, while Forrest is mowing the lawn, Jenny returns to visit him, and he proposes marriage to her. She declines, though feels obliged to prove her love to him by sleeping with him, then she leaves early the next morning. On a whim, Forrest elects to go for a run. Seemingly capriciously, he decides to keep running across the country several times for over three years, becoming famous in the process. During his run, Forrest unwittingly inspires two separate entrepreneurs to create Smiley Face/"Have a Nice Day" T-shirts and "Shit Happens" bumper stickers. In the present, Forrest reveals that he is waiting at the bus stop because he had received a letter from Jenny, who, having seen him run on television, had asked him to visit her. Once he is reunited with Jenny, Forrest discovers that she has a young son, of whom Forrest is the father and who is exceptionally intelligent. Jenny tells Forrest she is suffering from an unknown illness implied to be HIV[citation needed]. Together the three move back to Greenbow, Alabama. Jenny and Forrest finally marry, with a completely changed Dan arriving for the wedding (now able to walk with the use of prosthetic limbs made of titanium alloy.) Jenny dies soon afterwards. The film ends with father and son waiting for the school bus on little Forrest's first day of school. Opening the book his son is taking to school, the white feather from the beginning of the movie is seen to fall from within the pages. As the bus pulls away, the white feather is caught on a breeze and drifts skyward. [edit] Differences from novel Forrest Gump is based on the 1986 novel by Winston Groom. Both center around the character of Forrest Gump. However, the film primarily focuses on the first eleven chapters of the novel, before skipping ahead to the end of the novel with the founding of Bubba Gump Shrimp and the meeting with Forrest Jr. In addition to skipping some parts of the novel, the film adds several aspects to Forrest's life that do not occur in the novel, such as his needing leg braces as a child and his run across the country. Forrest's core character and personality are also changed from the novel, among other things he is an autistic savant - while playing football at the university, he fails craft and gym, but receives a perfect score in an advanced physics class he was enrolled in by his coach to satisfy his college requirements. Less