FilmCouch

Film Couch #30

"You can't expect some 60-year-old man to be just like, 'Clueless was excellent!'"

"Right, and it's those same 60-year-old men who decided en masse that Vertigo was 60 times better than 10 years ago."

I just want you all to know that I begged, I pleaded, i cajoled the other guys to go with Clueless instead of Vertigo. Or if not Clueless, then at least Shawshank... 

Re: Film Couch #30

haha! thanks Joem for starting the thread.

so what do you guys think? what makes a box office flop prison movie become so cherished in the hearts movie-watchers? is there something about the film that makes it inherently better to watch on home video and not in the theater? it's almost like millions of people saw the trailer and said en masse, "That looks pretty good, but i'll wait til it comes out on video to praise it as the best cinematic creation of all time."

Re: Film Couch #30

In the nominations for "The Seven Wonders of the Blogosphere," I've entered Shawshank's enduring high postion in the IMDB database.

The following doesn't explain the phenomenon, but I wonder if it isn't somehow related:

I'm out jogging, listening to a movie podcast, and the host  says  "Here's my list of the 5 greatest movies about mothers,"  and he lists his 5 choices, along with a few honorable mentions, and explains why he made the choices that he made. (I only know of two movie podcasts with at least one  female host.) And then he says to us, the listeners, "What's your list?" So I turn off the iPod and let the brain range back over the movies that I've seen, or haven't seen, and think of this one and that one with or about a mother, or two mothers, or newborn babies lowered out the windows of the hospital as in "Hard Boiled"...  but I digress. Anyway, next thing, I have a list of ten, fifty, a hundred movies with moms in them.  E.g, Godzilla had her baby in the subway. (Or did she? I didn't stick around  long enough to find out.)

Then I come back to my computer and navigate to the podcast forum - and by the way, I'm not talking about FilmSpotting or the knowledgeable Spout posters here - and I find that someone has posted a comment like "I think you've named all the best mom movies, except I can't believe you forgot Throw Momma from the Train."

Literally thousands of movies about moms out there and here we've got  "I think you've named all the best mom movies," when I know full well that with a little prodding, the poster could come up with a hundred of his or her own valid choices. Something Shawshanky going on there.

And btw, I've done that thing where you pick the nodal starting point in the title "The Shawshank Redemption" and take every 666th character in the imdb list, cycling back, and no matter how the titles change rank from week to week, it always spells out "Stephen King."

And just to note that on this list of the 250 GREATEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME, is to be found "Grindhouse," "Hot Fuzz," and, yes, with Jennifer Connelly ACTING HER HEART OUT, now at #250 with a bullet, "Blood Diamond."

Re: Film Couch #30

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Ok, so I realize that I'm over a year late to this discussion, but I just recently discovered Filmcouch and have been working my way back through the archives and just recently listened to this episode.  I think some of what I had to say about The Shawshank Redemption has already been discussed in this thread but there are a couple of other things I wanted to mention.

First, this is an impossible movie to market.  It's a period piece, prison drama featuring a mostly male cast with (at the time) no major, bankable stars.  How do you market this movie?  Perhaps you could do an effective job, but this film did not get a good marketing campaign.  Interestingly, this may have worked in its favor in the long run, as I can definitely tell you that I wasn't expecting to enjoy this movie anywhere near as much as I did when I first sat down to watch it.  I was in college at the time and my roommate bought the VHS and I remembering acting skeptical about his movie taste until he forced me to watch it.  Put simply, I was blown away.  Lowered expectations can do a lot to elevate a film, so I think that's also part of it.

And honestly, the movie is immensely and unexpectedly entertaining. As Shaun notes, it  allows viewers to have their cake and eat it too.  It's hard hitting and dark, but it also ends on an incredibly positive note.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that the main character in this movie is actually Red, not Andy.  The titular "redemption" is all about Red.  It's an interesting trick, as Andy appears to be the focus of the film, and indeed he is the catalyst for everything that happens in the film.  But Andy Dufresne doesn't change much throughout the story.  He never loses hope and while there are some metaphorical implications that can be drawn from his story (as mentioned in the podcast), the real story is about "institutionalization."  If the story was really about Andy, there wouldn't have been a tangent for what happened to Brooks, and the movie would have ended with the escape.  Instead, the movie goes on for another 20-30 minutes as we see Red escape his institutionalization, thanks to Andy.

While I'm sure there are lots of people who can relate to the wrongly imprisoned role of Andy, I think everyone can relate to the institutionalization issue in one way or another.  It can be a very broad metaphor and thus allows a wide range of interpretations.  And while I certainly don't like the "anal rape" portion of the story, it's really institutionalization that is the danger in this movie.  And that's a scary thing, because it doesn't just apply to prisons.

So it doesn't surprise me at all that this movie is so popular.  I wouldn't classify it as my favorite of all time, but I imagine it would make my top 100 movies list...