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.

  • GenXen [any, any]
    ·
    3 months ago

    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.