(2)- little more than a cameo. Woundage:
(6)- pummeled by an All-American football player fresh out of Vietnam. That's gotta hurt.
RATINGS:
Screen Time: (2)- little more than a cameo.
Woundage: (6)- pummeled by an All-American football player fresh out of Vietnam. That's gotta hurt.
Aesthetics: 
(7)- it's a different look. But a good one.
Forrest Gump is a movie that is very close to my heart. When it first came out, I actually went to see it in the theater twice, which is something I never do. To me, this is a movie that has everything: compelling acting (Tom Hanks won an Oscar, duh), proper historical context, a beautiful story about the triumph of the human spirit, a compelling love story, amazing special effects, and, as I found out later, Geoffrey Blake. A few months back, as I was trying to find other Blake projects to watch aside from Contact, I discovered via the Internet Movie Database that he'd been in what was and still is my favorite movie. The name "Wesley" didn't immediately ring a bell. But after turning it over in my head for awhile, I remembered Jenny's line of dialogue (yes, I probably could recite this movie if you asked me to): "Forrest, I'd like you to meet Wesley. Wesley and I live together in Berkeley…Wesley, this is my friend I was telling you about. This is Forrest Gump." Then it all came back to me very swiftly.
In short, Geoffrey's character in this movie is a complete and total jerk and all-around poor excuse for a human being. A radical hippie who travels with Jenny to a rally in Washington, DC, he has a horrible temper and is abusive to her. At a "Black Panther Party," Forrest sees him slap Jenny and subsequently beats the crap out of him. "He should not be hitting you, Jenny," Forrest says. The next morning, Wesley finds Forrest and Jenny as Jenny is about to board the bus back to Berkeley. "Jenny, I'm sorry," he says. "Things got a little out of hand last night. It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson!" The audience reaction is a mass groaning at the supreme corniness of the statement, magnified by the fact that Jenny falls for it completely.
When I was 14 years old, I thought that this character was really good-looking, and I said so to one of my friends, who immediately rebuffed me for thinking that such an asshole could have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. And that, my friends, is where the major problem with Wesley lies. He has nothing good going for him. He is supremely and intrinsically evil. Like many other Geoffrey Blake characters, you are not supposed to like him. Your sympathies are supposed to lie solely with Tom Hanks. (but I liked him anyway. so there.) And this is the fatal flaw that keeps Forrest Gump from becoming, unanimously, the greatest motion picture ever made. The lines of good and evil are too boldly drawn. Because life is like a box of chocolates in more ways than one. Not only do you never know what you're going to get, some people like certain kinds that others don't. There are no good flavors or bad flavors, and to portray the Geoffrey Blake character as a "bad flavor" is even more fundamentally flawed than the character himself.
On a side note, I recently had the mixed pleasure of viewing a movie entitled Crazy Six with Rob Lowe and Burt Reynolds in which Rob's dress and mannerisms are virtually identical to Wesley's. I'm not sure what exactly this means, except that I will venture to guess that after being the president of the Berkeley chapter of whatever antiwar group Wesley was the president of, he changed his name to Crazy Six and began smuggling drugs in Eastern Europe.
