I always picture that scene of them meeting on the beach as what’s going through Red’s head when he’s on the bus out of town, not as reality. That goes better with what he’s actually saying.
Pretty interesting plot with excellent actors and a happy ending. Isn’t that enough? It is not a great movie but an enjoyable one.
I loved the novella and liked the film, but I think it is quite overrated. Much of the storytelling is ham-handed, and there are a lot of unnecessary details of the brutal and excretory variety.
Still, the leads are excellent, it has Clancy Brown (who never fails to contribute awesomeness, even to lackluster productions), the cinematography is beautiful, and there are several memorable moments.
I agree that this is a better ending in print, but not in a visual medium. After spending so much time looking at grey walls, that huge expanse of impossibly-blue ocean is just stunning. It’s as much a reward for the audience as it is for Red. For me the film would have lost a lot of its impact without this image.
According to a family guy episode this is what made the film special.
maybe it appealed to the average viewer because they were such good friends despite the difference in colour?
I mean, the mid 1990s weren’t a great time for race relations in the USA, talking as a Englishman who has sparse knowledge, I seem to remember riots in l.a. and stuff?
Since the original discussion, Quentin Tarantino came up with a good term to describe films like this - “hang-out movies”. Films you watch just to enjoy spending time with the characters.
Let’s look at the movies below it on the imdb top 250:
- 9.2 The Shawshank Redemption (1994) 1,004,452
- 9.2 The Godfather (1972) 709,727
- 9.0 The Godfather: Part II (1974) 459,165
- 8.9 Pulp Fiction (1994) 779,803
- 8.9 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) 303,022
- 8.9 The Dark Knight (2008) 979,695
- 8.9 12 Angry Men (1957) 246,636
- 8.9 Schindler’s List (1993) 512,219
- 8.8 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 714,891
- 8.8 Fight Club (1999)
Personally, I found the Godfather movies incredibly boring. I’ve tried several times, but I seriously can’t sit through more than 20 minutes of that mind-numbing crap. I saw Death in Venice for the first time yesterday, and that was also an incredibly soporific early '70s experience.
Pulp Fiction is decent, but it’s more of a vehicle for Tarantino than anything else.
The Dark Knight is possibly the most overrated piece of garbage in the history of human artistic expression.
I haven’t seen #5, #7, or #8, but I’d suspect that only Schindler’s List out of those three movies deserves serious consideration as the #1 movie of all time.
So why not Shawshank? It’s a very human story that doesn’t hold back about the horrors and highs of what it means to be human.
It has been given so many accolades by your average movie watcher because it really speaks to people.