Do I not get it or something?
It just felt like an individualist white middle class mans fantasy of how he’d totally outgrind and outsmart the prison system by doing epic taxes and being a good person
just befriend the prison guards!
play beautiful cultured classical music to these poor barbarous inmates as an act of # la resistance
then, totally own the corrupt system by exposing them to newspapers… the police and judicial system are otherwise perfect so the prison commissioner will kill himself rather than face the HARSH HARSH CONSEQUENCES that one could receive in America for money laundering… notwithstanding that the money laundering is chump change in comparison to the slave wage labour that the inmates are made to perform…
Morgan Freeman speaks in hope platitudes for the entire movie
Is this movie not just about how all you need to do is grin and grind to escape your hellish life?
Then people jerk it off for ‘showing the humanity of prisoners for the first time EVER in cinema and not treating prison rape as a joke’ - surely you can only find such a thing to be true if you have only ever seen about 5 movies in your life? Or is that just a pure indictment of the Hollywood system - that it only ever makes garbage visible?
Am I being cynical? Was I just in a bad mood?
Utterly cheesy and without charm.
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it’s just a story told with good direction and characterization about justice delayed and not surrendering to despair. lots of people like those stories, where the goodies end up happy and the baddies get their medicine.
the redemption arc wasn’t Andy. it was Red. Red was deeply cynical, on his way to becoming Brooks, but found his way out through friendship.
I suppose so, yeah. Although I didn’t really like Red’s characterization because it seemed so platitudinal. Otherwise yeah, it looks nice and feels, for the most part, human.
At the end of the day, what can one expect from a Stephen King hollywood adaptation?
EDIT: I love One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for that reason, although I guess that’s a more cynically ending film. The big moment for Chief gives me more catharsis than Andy or Red’s escape.
The funniest Stephen King adaptation is the one adapted to film by Stephen King: Maximum Overdrive.
he has given interviews that were pretty explicit about the movie the ended up with was Stephen King director making a Stephen King book into a movie, fueled by cocaine.
like I want to say he said something like, he watched the completed movie and decided he needed to “get clean” over it.
Hiring AC/DC to score a 3-hour film is one of those things that should put any self-respecting cokehead on the path to sobriety.
Rewatched it recently, it is genius even though it’s deranged.
WE MADE YOU. WEEEE MADE YOUUUUUU
Also I love this bit of lore:
Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver’s side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection.
So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what’s happening here, right? I’d crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you’ve made a terrible mistake. I didn’t get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.
So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I’d crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn’t done, and although I didn’t understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.
Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, “What is this axis shit?” and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, “Can you break it – the rule?” He said, “It’s better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin” (which I never have), “it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it.” Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: “What’s this about crossing the axis?” and he burst out laughing and said, “That always gets me.” And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, “Stephen, you can do anything. You’re the director.” Then he paused and said, “But it doesn’t cut together.”
Ha, nice. My favorite Maximum Overdrive Deep Lore was an outtake from when they shot the sequence where the steamroller runs over the little league team. In the finished cut, the blood bag smears over the roller. In the outtake cut, it just explodes everywhere. King claims that he sent that footage over to Romero, and that Romero vomited after seeing it.
…Maybe it’s not that deep of Deep Lore if a presenter was talking about it when they aired it on TNT back in the 90s.
U could also take it as “use your visible signifiers as a protected class to grift the powers that be, right up until the point where you utterly fuck them over, while using what access you have to power to the betterment of everyone around you”
Idk, I like the movie, I do think you’re being cynical, but I’m just one person on the internet
Edit: I also feel like there’s an obvious theme of “our justice system is utterly fucked and does not care about reintroducing people into society, only about breaking their humanity.” Only then does Red get paroled. I don’t think there’s anything unique about Shawshank where they’re like “this is the one spooky, evil jail,” it’s just like, prison is an utterly fucked institution upheld only by the sadism of those who run it, and real justice is a bullet through the warden’s skull
I guess you could read it that way if you chose to, but it doesn’t necessarily feel intended. I mean, the ending is basically just Andy and Red being like ‘hey I got mine, time to get completely trashed off cheap margaritas until I die’ (which is awesome and I suppose fair given the circumstances).
The second thing, yes, true overall. That is definitely a strong and pretty well presented theme, but lacking in critical/analytical details that I expected from 'THE PRISON MOVIE OF ALL TIME. I did feel like they implied Shawshank was extra bad a few times though, although I watched it a while ago so perhaps not.
I think there’s a lot of things one could ascribe to it, but overall given that it’s so widely enjoyed and referenced by liberals and conservatives alike, it tells me that it’s themes were perhaps not so controversial or radical.
I also think that setting it in the late 40s means the average late 90s viewer can rest easy knowing that hey, those were the bad times!
I also think if I knew nothing about it going into it, I could have gone, eh, it’s a feelgood prison drama, it’s enjoyable enough… but given it’s acclaim I was more disappointed than hating perhaps.
I feel like seeing this movie at an impressionable age helped me understand that the American penal system is irredeemable, and that was part of my path to the leftist nutjob u see before u. So it holds a special place to me for that.
No, you get it perfectly. It’s “American Dream: The movie”. Innocent white middle class man can pick himself up from his bootstraps even from the prison cell. I watched it years ago, and felt exactly what you describe.
Somehow I could find almost no opinions of the like online, not even in the dregs of the ‘lowest star rating’ section of letterboxd.
The movie going out of it’s way to let the audience know that the guy has been innocently convicted just takes all the interest ouf of the whole thing. This being the all-time IMDb top movie is pretty telling for just how wide as an ocean-deep as a puddle that sites understanding of film was. Thank God for letterboxed (which also sucks in tons of different ways).
If you are in the mood for other prison films I’d recommend Grand Illusion by Jean Renoir (although that films pre-WW2 humanism could definitely rub someone the wrong way if they’re not in the mood for it) or Reform School Girls which is an absolute exploitation masterpiece.
Exactly! I forgot to mention that part about his innocence!
It’s like - ok well you should empathise with this guy because he’s innocent, not because the prison system is inhumane.
Dog Pound is probably the best prison movie I’ve seen. It’s about two boys in Canadian juvenile detention. One is in for getting caught selling drugs, the other for assault (on multiple people, including a cop). Absolutely gut wrenching ending, though. It’s much more bleak and probably a better display of the justice system.
Check CWs before hand if you have any problems with that sort of thing. It’s a hard watch because they’re also children and shouldn’t be in prison.
Love the scene where they redeem the shawshank
It’s peak Oscar bait, and may have been made from the ground up to be the ultimate Oscar bait, from the music to the cinematography choices, and of course the bootstrappy liberal crocodile tears.
Hadn’t watched it full only the final 10 minutes, does the shawshank gets redempted?
The redemption actually gets shanked in the shaw. Pretty crazy twist.
They learn that the real shawshank was the friends they made along the way, I think
I don’t know what the movie’s about
They learn that the real shawshank was the friends they made along the way, I think
I mean, yeah, basically the narrator’s character arc
I don’t disagree that it’s an ultra liberal text and is on the cheesy side but I also really like it for what it is, a very well crafted 90s flick that tells a compelling story well. sure it’s overrated but it’s a very enjoyable watch imo. miles better than Forrest Gump which kinda holds a similar place in peoples minds
then people jerk it off for ‘showing the humanity of prisoners for the first time EVER in cinema and not treating prison rape as a joke’
no way people say this. this is what someone who has seen exactly one prison film would say
Well, yeah. Exactly. It was the foremost Reddit opinion I saw about it’s praises.
i’m usually prepared for reddit ignorance but it’s not like prison films are underground, there are so many it has distinct sub-genres of escape-thriller/drama/prisoner-of-war. people still quote Cool Hand Luke for gods sake
Coolhand Luke Skystalker?!
I think it’s fine but agree it’s nowhere near a best movie list. At least it’s not what I’m looking for in a movie.
Cheesy and without charm, idk. Might be cynical or just a taste thing. But the movie does feel really white in a way I can’t put into words, and “cheesy” kinda works. There’s kind of a charm to it, but in an idyllic faux grittiness, like a portrayal of societal problems in an unthreatening, individualistic way that wraps it all up in a feel good ending.
Who gonna make a George Jackson movie?
Part of me feels like this take is cynical just for the sake of being cynical, but then I remember that I watched the movie around the time that it came out, before it became ‘the best movie of all time’. It got good reviews at the time, but it definitely didn’t get that kind of praise out of the gate.
I remember that TBS would play it non-stop, and thinking about that now, it’s probably a huge reason why this film got voted to that spot on IMDB. For me, I just watched a movie that I thought was pretty good ,worth re-watching, and years later when I heard ‘it’s been voted as…’ , I thought ‘yeah, I guess I could kind of see why it would get that vote’.
But if it’s always been hyped to you as the greatest film of all time before you watched it… I could also understand you asking what the big deal is.
As far as performances go, Freeman and Robbins aren’t where the magic is. They’re fine in their lead roles, but nobody ever says ‘oooh Robbins was so good in that!’. It’s the character actors that give this film it’s shine.
The other characters are pretty great, true.
I learned beer tastes so good after forced manual labor, it almost makes it worth it!
