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.
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.
Also I love this bit of lore:
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.