Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Shawshank Redemption Is An Incredible Film

The Shawshank Redemption is an incredible film about a terrible fictitious prison and the horrible experiences of a prison inmate wrongfully accused of murder. Despite his grave predicament, however, he manages to escape and right many wrongs. The movie stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, both of whom do a terrific job. Originally a story in a Stephen King book, the Different Seasons, known as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, the story was adapted and the movie created. The movie was directed and the screenplay written by Frank Darabont. The movie was his first major production. Interestingly Stephen King has written two stories about prisons, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, which happen to be the first two movies that Frank Darabont directed.

Andy Dufrense (Robbins) is wrongfully convicted of the murders of his wife and her lover and sentenced to two lifetime sentences at Shawshank, a fictitious prison in Maine. Conditions at the prison are deplorable. Andy gets beaten and raped regularly. However, he proves very resourceful. He becomes friends with another inmate named Red (Freeman), who obtains a pick and posters of various actresses for him, which he posts on the wall of his cell. The Shawshank Redemption did not achieve great success, despite the great buzz already generated by the Hollywood industry due to the great story. This was in part due to great competition at the time, and also the fact that the story is about a prison, which put many movie goers off. However, after the release to DVD the Shawshank Redemption sold in huge quantities making it a firm favorite.

A very old inmate who'd been sentenced for life finally gets paroled, but after some 50 years in prison, he doesn't want to leave anymore, having been institutionalized. He threatens to kill the warden in the hope that they'll keep him, but they let him go in any case. Shortly thereafter, he commits suicide. After Andy has been at Shawshank for nearly 20 years, a prisoner named Tommy reveals that he has evidence of Andy's innocence. The warden calls him outside privately to ask him if he will testify on Andy's behalf, to which he says yes. As a result, the warden has him killed. Meanwhile, Andy has been in solitary confinement for a month and the warden decides to keep him for another month. Unbeknownst to anyone at Shawshank, Andy had been working on an escape plan for nearly the entire time he'd been there. He'd been digging a hole through the wall, which he'd kept hidden by his posters. The warden learns of this when he finds Andy missing from his cell. Andy manages to escape after crawling through 500 yards of underground sewer pipe. Once freed, he presents evidence of the warden's illegal money laundering. Once the warden learns of this, he commits suicide before having the chance to be tried.

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