Tom Hanks's bow as writer-director, a rock musical in regressive pursuit of early-Beatles innocence, simplicity, pep, cheer, and other illusory or evanescent states. For all its relative smallness and modesty -- relative, for pertinent examples, to Forrest Gump and to Apollo 13 -- the movie gives off a glow of abundance, endowment, infinite resource. The locale of Patterson's Appliances, at the outset, allows for whole wide-ranging rows, not single specimens, of period televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, clock-radios. And not only there, but everywhere. Cars, clothes, furniture -- whatever you need, Mr. Hanks. There is a comparable sense of gluttony and gratification in the more purely creative areas of the movie. (One area of impoverishment: the rock-and-roll scene circa 1964 is so little filled in that the fictitious garage band out of Erie, Pa., would appear almost to have originated the phenomenon themselves.) Hanks, then, is nothing if not industrious, though the flip side of that is the affliction of not knowing when to quit (e. g., the American Graffiti-style printed epilogues that keep the movie going even after it's over), and his bounteous output is never slowed by worries over quality-control ("You are my biggest fan," gushes the awestruck drummer to his idolized jazzman). The point, to put it bluntly, is simply to keep it coming -- laugh lines, bits of comic business, songs, production values, what-have-you. The point, to sharpen it just slightly, is to keep the spectator so occupied that he has no time to think how he might better be occupied. With Tom Everett Scott, Steve Zahn, Jonathan Schaech, Liv Tyler, Ethan Embry, Charlize Theron, and Hanks. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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