Just finished watching The Terminal, the new Tom Hanks movie. Man, is the guy selective when he looks for a script! Almost all I’ve seen of him are great movies; The Green Mile, Cast Away, Road to Perdition, Catch Me if You Can, Saving Private Ryan, You’ve Got Mail, Forrest Gump, Sleepless in Seattle (that being one of my favorites)… he’s got a resume as long as a mile with those films under his belt, and he’s just about the best mature actor out there (leave out the chick magnets like Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and Tom Cruise, and the adolescent boy wannabes like the Governerator or Mr. Rambo, and there are a few genuinely nice actors out there… like Russel Crowe, or Denzel Washington) and no wonder Spielberg picked him for The Terminal.

The movie has a simple plot, a man gets stuck in an airport terminal because of a crisis in his home country. He has to stay there for a long while, so he starts getting acquainted with the people in the terminal, and things move on from there. Hanks portrays the role of a clueless foreigner to perfection, and he generally fits into his role very smoothly. This movie could have taken a jab at the airport policies of the US, but instead it’s about the people in the terminal and how a man with no money at all can make a living in an airport. It’s an amazing little movie because it has lost opportunities, less than perfect romantic scenes, and an open ending (perhaps for a sequel?). I really liked this.