Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Get Busy Living, Or Get Busy Dying


The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
IMDB
Directed by: Frank Darabont
My Rate: 5/5

Everything is in the chain. Good things come in your good times, when you look for motivation, it will find its way to you. The Shawshank Redemption is the story of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) an innocent banker accused for the murder of his wife and her lover, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank prison. The prison shows the teeth in the first night to him and all other new comers. When one of them couldn't help crying after the lights out, the guards beat him to death!

The hard labour, ruthless wardens, rapists, and the solitary cells are enough to make everybody break down, but:

[spoiler]
Andy never gives up, he uses his abilities to make it a better place to live for other prisoners, he asks for financial aid for organising a prison library by writing a letter per week to charity organisations for 5 years, until they accept to help him with a 200$ check, but he won't be satisfied by it and starts to write two letters per week to beg for more aid!

He gives useful financial advices to the guards and that makes him known to the prison warden. The warden makes him his consultee to perform money laundry for him! That gives great power to Andy, although he is humiliated as a criminal by the warden. But Andy has bigger plans in his mind...
[/spoiler]

This is a story of hope and endeavour. Although it's ficition but who cares as long as it's beautiful and motivating? Andy says in a scene to his friend, Red (Morgan Freeman): Get busy living, or get busy dying. The world was very cruel and unfair to him but he chose the first option.


3 comments:

H.B. said...

I enjoyed the way he treated the prison warden. I mean how to use the book and the picture to reach to his goals.

Gog said...

I liked this movie quite a lot when I saw it many years ago. I don't know if it's the kind of movie you remember for a a long time, I can remember it partially, just the important scriptlines.
I can just say, that Morgan Freeman is a great actor, one of the best actors in Hollywood today.

The Monkey In The Corner said...

I like him too, the first film I saw from him was Se7en, if I'm not wrong. I liked the way he played God in Bruce Almighty too.