Wikipedia says that “that “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) is considered “one of the greatest films of all time.” OK. It’s a good movie. If “one of the greatest films of all time” means one of the best 250 movies, I can live with that. But let’s not get carried away. The Stephen King novella adaptation has been the #1 ranked movie on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) for over two decades, which tells me that the people who frequent that site do so because they don’t know much about American cinema—you know, like Ann Althouse. A substacker I never heard of writes, “I know I’m thirty years late, but I finally watched The Shawshank Redemption. I laughed, I cried, I threw a metaphorical tomato (many, in fact) at the warden and his prison guards, I walloped and fist-bumped in joy at the end. It lived up to every bit of hype and, in my opinion, justified its place as the #1 ranked movie…” That’s nice. You need to get out more, and I officially don’t care what you think about anything else.
But she’s not alone. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 89% approval rating from 146 critics, It has a score of 82 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 22 critics indicating “universal acclaim”.The American Film Institute ranked the film number 72 on its 2007 AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) list, outranking “Pulp Fiction” released the same year. It was also number 23 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Cheers (2006) list of “most inspiring films.” I think I could list 23 equally or more inspiring films in the sports category alone of the top of my head. The Writers Guild of America listed Frank Darabont’s screenplay at #22 on its list of the 101 greatest screenplays. In 2014, “The Shawshank Redemption” was named Hollywood’s fourth-favorite film, based on a survey of 2,120 Hollywood-based entertainment industry members.
Yes, that’s because the California wokies want to abolish prisons. I’d vote the movie only the second-best film adaptation of a Stephen King novella.
I just watched most of the movie again for the first time in many years. Even if I had been a member of “The Shawshank Redemption” cult, however, I couldn’t forgive the film this gaffe that I missed first time around: in a long panning shot as “Red” (Morgan Freeman) goes on in his soporific narration about how the inmates must have hobbies, there is a brief shot of a chess board, set up and ready for a game.
The board is set up wrong, with a black square on the right-hand corner. I have written about that careless, insulting mistake twice, first in 2022’s Chess Board Ethics: A Popeye. Quote:
There is one line in that movie that sticks in my head and it came to mind today when I read your post, “Peak Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck Insanity! “The View’s” Sara Haines Can’t Understand Why Clancy’s Husband Divorced Her”
“Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?””
Andy: How can you be so obtuse?
Warden Norton: What did you call me?
Andy: Obtuse. Is it deliberate?
Replace Warden Norton with Sara Haines.
Jack: I get your point”Signature Significance” when it comes to chess board orientation.
how does that apply to The Shawshank Redemption?
the “in-world” explanation (you see these a lot in the analyses of issues in Star Wars) is simply: felons of the time had no idea where the white square went. The fire or may have intentionally put the white Square in the wrong place, thinking “if nothing else, Hack Marshall will know these guys are rubes.”
shawshank Redemption is a great movie. I am not sure it could beat Pulp Fiction (a great film in other ways).
Shawshank Redemption was great as a “thinking man’s” film.
If you compare The Shawshank Redemption with the Redemption of Jules Winnfield (Pulp Fiction), Pulp Fiction is immediately gratifying. You get the resolution right away; the Shawshank Redemption drags out for years. To appreciate Shawshank Redemption, you have to imagine decades; pulp Fiction occurs over the course of a few days
I am not going to tout Shawshank Redemption as greatest of all time, but it was a great movie that, understandably, did not get acknowledged in the general culture
-Jut
I hate being called Hack Marshall…
It doesn’t work. If you don’t know how to play chess, then you don’t play chess, and don’t know how to set up the board at all. The pieces were set up right, just the board was wrong. As the earlier post indicated, this turns up a lot, in movies, on TV shows, in ads. You really think the set dressers decided, “Let’s show the board set up wrong because chess-playing prisoners might not know the white square in on the right”? Occam’s Razor rules: the board was wrong because nobody checked.
My props designer, when we did “Stage Door,” checked to make sure none of the candy bars in the bowl of candy the script called for postdated the script (1936). That’s called professionalism. I expect movies to be made by professionals equal to those who worked in my small professional regionals theater.
By way of contrast, there is a scene in the queue for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World featuring a pair of skeletons playing chess. Not only is the board properly set and oriented, but the arrangement of the pieces has the game in a stalemate of endless move/countermove pairs.
As the tour guide tells us, the joke is that a true chess enthusiast would rather die than admit they can’t win the game, thus these players remain as skeletons implying that they did exactly that.
I, too, appreciate when people pay attention to the details.
–Dwayne