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.
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.