Turkey Roast

I owe my abiding love for B-movies to Dabba.

The official name was Sri Ganesh Talkies ad it was located a couple of kilometres from the campus gate at BITS, Pilani. It had four walls, a makeshift ceiling, and the projectionist’s dhoti for a screen. I’m guessing he diligently washed it every February 29th. Front bench (and I really mean bench) seats cost 3 bucks, back bench seats cost 4 bucks and luxury seating in the back row cost 5 bucks. When they increased ticket prices across the board by one buck, we even bargained with the guy at the counter for a few weeks and got a discount. The front row seats were convenient — you could stretch your legs out on the bench. (The fact that there were rats scurrying around might have had something to do with it as well.) They changed the movie every 3-4 days  — not enough film-goers around to run a movie for a whole week.

Much of what made its way to Dabba came direct from Ooty, where Prabhuji Mithun Chakraborty ran a film factory that produced movies as often as Ram Gopal Varma  (but with less variance in quality or box office appeal). The immutable physical laws that govern the universe state that Prabhuji must have either a sister (who usually gets raped/killed) or a brother (who gets killed, leaving him to look after said brother’s girlfriend/fiancee/wife who may also have gotten raped in the process). It seemed to us that there was a virtual glut of interchangeable, well-endowed starlets vying for this role, because I don’t remember seeing the same actress playing his sister twice.

Mithun didn’t have a monopoly on this industry either: a movie called Rakhwaale (not to be confused with the Anil Kapoor starrer, Rakhwaala) remains seared into my neurons for all time. Sure, it had a preposterous plot and a no-name hero who delivered the Great Sequoia of wooden performances. What really made it special was that, every once in a while, there would be a shot of Mukesh Khanna in a tan overcoat and matching fedora watching the action from a discreet spot and then glowering significantly at the camera. Right at the end, it is revealed that he is a CBI officer or some such thing. Absoslutely sublime, I tell you.

But here’s the thing: I do not remember disliking any of these movies. They were honest, sincere efforts at making a B-movie and we received them in that spirit. Nobody went into Dabba expecting Citizen Kane. Nobody came out disappointed.

It was when I went to watch some big name star/director make an ass of himself that I came away disappointed. Mithun delivered exactly what he promised. But Aamir Khan in Mann — that was another matter entirely. These were the real cinematic turkeys, the ones I plan to roast in this post. This is a short, non-exhaustive list of some of the worst such offenders that I have come across. These don’t fall in the category of Locomotive 38 movies — they’re just plain crappy, period.

Aside: You’re probably wondering whether I really needed to take this long to get to the point of this post. I like to digress, okay? If you ever hear me say Abhivaadaye, you might notice the name Polonius slipped in between Bhargava and Jamadagni.

1. Mann: Indra Kumar’s remake of An Affair to Remember, starring Aamir Khan and Manisha Koirala. The first half, set aboard a cruise ship, involves ninety minutes of such abominable filmmaking that it ought to have been banned by the Geneva Convention. A few scenes from that nightmare :  as soon as Manisha boards the ship, she collides with…  no, not the hero, as usually happens, but a desi version of Mike Myers in all his shagadelic glory.  (Funny as the original?  Not so much.)  One character on the ship who keeps laughing like a hyena being sodomized by a cattle prod inside a room filled with nitrous oxide.  Imagine hearing it at the end of one scene, and just to make sure that you stay on the wall you’ve been driven up, a continuation of that in the beginning of the next scene. On top of which, Aamir and Manisha act like a Lifetime Achievement Razzie is up for grabs on the strength of this one performance. I have never prayed harder for icebergs.

2. Jhoom Barabar Jhoom: You get Abhishek Bachchan, Priety Zinta and Amitabh to act in the same movie and what do you do? Put them in something that looks like a musical, sounds like a musical and wants to be a musical but ends up being a pile of guano gone bad. Dress Amitabh up like he had an unfortunate incident involving a peacock and a quantum teleportation device. Painful to the point where regular readers of this blog, such as there are, will immediately understand what I mean when I call a movie a JBJ experience. (Full review here.)

3. Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag: Apparently, the Large Hadron Collider has been working fine for a few years now. RGV tried to produce antimatter by running Sholay from two separate projectors and smashing those beams together. The result so unnerved the scientists at CERN that they shut it down and made up a story about eddies in the spacetime continuum and somebody stealing magnets for their fridge.

4. Baba: I don’t mind the fact that Rajni wanted to showcase his spiritual side in this movie. Nor the fact that he and Manish Koirala looked like the Hobo and the Hippo (some people look good with a quadruple chin, but she isn’t one of them). What I do mind is the fact that Rajni thought he could mix up little bits from the Amman movie genre (the bits involving magicians with diabolical plans and much sinister laughter) with standard Rajni movie staples, add some mystical stuff about immortal ascetics in the Himalayas and get away with it. And a whole raft of actors and a director like Suresh Krishna (who, as it happens, directed Baasha) went along with him. Couldn’t somebody — anybody, really — have whacked him upside the head with something hard, blunt and radioactive? Was the money that good?

5. Anjali: Of the lot, this is the most disappointing. Its child stars won special National awards for their performances. It has a few really good moments and a beautiful story about prejudice and acceptance in various forms. But to get to all of that, you have to get past a bunch of loud performances, annoyingly precocious kids and and scenes set in an apartment that Howard Roark would’ve blown up on general principle. And to top it all off, the most annoying death scene in the history of cinema. If that little girl had screamed “Ezhundiru Anjali, ezhundiru” one more time, Mani Rathnam could’ve made Anjali 2: Night of the Living Dead as his follow-up feature.

Dedication: I don’t know if there is such a thing as dedicating blog posts, but I would like to dedicate this one to two of my friends, Renugopal and Tarun, with whom I have watched more crappy movies than anyone in their right mind ever would.

 

Thanksgiving

Whenever I hear of gated communities in Bangalore occupied by recently-returned-NRIs, I can’t resist asking if they celebrate Diwali with as much fervour as they do Halloween and Thanksgiving. Even though I have friends who fall into that demographic and live in places like that. I’m kind of an asshole that way.

So, by way of making amends, 24fps is going to celebrate Thanksgiving. Which, as per my understanding, involves something to do with turkey, families and acknowledging things we have to be thankful for.

Full disclosure: I have never been to America and really have no clue what Thanksgiving is all about. However, as I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I work on applied statistics and data mining for a living — in our line of work, we never let data (or a profound lack thereof) come in the way of our conclusions.

More posts coming up this weekend. Watch this space!

 

Freeze Frame #143: Baasha

I am sure there are a lot of Padaiyappa fans out there. Ditto for  Chandramukhi, Kuselan and Sivaji. I even know someone who claims to like Baba — for reasons too numerous to mention, I am disinclined to hold it against him, though. But as far as I am concerned, the last great Rajni movie that came out was Baasha.

There are numerous reasons for this, the most important of which is that it carries very little additional baggage. Sivaji had a romantic subplot that pretty much epitomized silliness. Padaiyappa was just too long, almost like someone stole a megaserial script from Radhika’s vault, gave the main character a penis and amped up the star power. Kuselan came close, but sometimes felt like a nice little story jostling for space with Rajni’s stardom. Chandramukhi faced a similar problem — it took a nice little supporting role and gave it more than its due simply because of who was playing it.

Baasha doesn’t do any of these things. It wants to be a great masala movie as much as it wants to be a star vehicle — as a result, although Rajni is present all over it, it doesn’t feel excessive. I think one big reason is the script. I cannot think of too many instances where a remake turned out to be infinitely better than the original simply by introducing a bit of nonlinearity in the storytelling.

For all its commercial success, Hum isn’t a particularly great movie. It starts well — the pervasive sense of fear about Bhaktavar (playing magnificiently by Danny Denzongpa) is well created, and when Tiger (AB) breaks the shackles, it is quite effective. But once he escapes and begins a new life, it all becomes very ho-hum. You know that his past will come back to haunt him, so all that is left is to see how and when. By adding a considerable bit of buffoonery involving two Kader Khans, the tension is brought down a couple more notches. By the time Bhaktavar came back, it was all I could do not to yawn.

Take Baasha on the other hand. Its central choice is very simple: Take the first act of Hum and push it down the order. Start with a man trying to lead a quiet life, with little hints that indicate that there might be more to him than it seems. The man you see is the typical do-gooder hero, but you are never allowed to take that for granted. For one thing, there are moments when he is about to lose his cool and his “other” identity seems to surface briefly, only to be quelled. There is also a moment when he reveals it to someone, but you don’t hear what is said, only the panicked reaction to it. Throughout the first half, the tension mounts. Just to ratchet it up even more, there is a sequence where he allows himself to be beaten up by a goon just to avoid a conflict.

All this might work well enough even with some other actor, but what really sells it is the fact that we know who Rajni is. Every time you see him controlling himself or going out of the way to avoid conflict, you’re not just wondering why the character would do this. You’re wondering why Rajni would do this. The movie takes his image as an invincible hero and asks him to rein it in, so that the audience is primed for the moment when he finally cuts loose.

This comes at around the midpoint of the movie, when the aforementioned goon goes too far and hurts his sister. This is, as far as movies of this ilk are concerned, The Unforgivable Sin. In what has since become a  tradition in action sequences involving a hero facing off against multiple goons, the first man unfortunate enough to make a move is hit so spectacularly hard that he doesn’t get up again.

I watched this movie in a little single-screen theatre in Chennai and when that blow landed, the entire audience erupted in cheers. The cheering didn’t die down until the fight sequence got over. And you know what, I could perfectly understand the feeling. Because I was whooping and hollering along with them.

ps: Shankar seems to have understood this strategy quite well. Throughout the first half of Sivaji, Rajni takes what is dished out to him. It is in the second half that he starts hitting back. Now, if he hadn’t made Rajni play such a lovesick twit in the first half, it would’ve worked sooo much better.

pps: Can you come up with instances where the remake turned out to be much better than the original? Might make for a good (if short) list.

ppps: And no, Hum Aapke Hain Koun doesn’t count, even if it made more money. I thought Nadiya Ke Paar was the better movie by far.

 

Freeze Frame #141, #142: In the Bedroom, Mystic River

When people are faced with a tragedy they cannot make sense of, they try to explain it to themselves in terms of things they understand and can control. They just need something to pin it on, something to channel their frustration into. Very often, a movie will concentrate on selling one of those explanations to the audience, simply because it takes far too much courage to do otherwise. One reason why I treasure In the Bedroom and Mystic River is that they are possessed of that courage.

Both films feature characters who are faced with a personal tragedy. In both cases, they eventually answer with violence and have to deal with their guilt, although for differing reasons.

In In the Bedroom, Matt ends up killing the man who murdered his son, but it is not purely a matter of revenge. His rage against his son’s killer may have remained impotent, were it not for the fact that his wife could not take it. It is her inability to deal with the tragedy that makes her turn on him and goad him into doing it.

In Mystic River, on the other hand, Jimmy is well capable of violence, and it was just a matter of finding the man who murdered his daughter so he could extract revenge. However, he finds out afterwards that he killed the wrong man.

Both men are consumed with guilt afterwards. In the Bedroom ends with a shot of Matt lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling while his wife sleeps beside him. You sense that, in the end, he is utterly alone. In Mystic River, on the other hand, Jimmy’s wife tells him that he did the right thing:

Because it’s like I told the girls. Their daddy is the king. And a king knows what to do and does it.

Think about this: the case where the wife is supportive is the one where the husband has killed the wrong man.

The key isn’t whether or not the guilty man was punished, but how the characters react to tragedy. Revenge is a very visceral reaction — irrespective of how civilized we would like to be, we cannot deny the fact that we are often dissatisfied with less than an eye for an eye. Both women regard their men as the instrument to achieve it. Their reaction is determined by whether they deem their husbands capable of the task.

What if it had turned out that the man who got killed at the end of Mystic River was indeed guilty, while the man who got killed in In the Bedroom was actually innocent? My guess is, these couples would have turned out the same way even then.

 

Kurbaan

I watched Kurbaan on Friday evening and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since. It is not that it is an extraordinary movie — the more I think about it, the more flaws spring to mind. But somehow, I am unable to bring myself to dislike it. I think my irrational fondness has a lot to do with one key exchange between two characters in the movie, both terrorists, one of whom has just found out that a loved one is about to die as a result of the plot he is part of.

“But she is innocent,” he protests. (Woh be-kasoor hai!)

“And how are we guilty,” retorts the other. (Aur hum kaun se kasoor-vaar hain?)

Any story that tries to personalize terrorism is likely to draw upon two emotions — the anger that springs from personal loss, and the fear of losing a loved one. But not often has a movie managed to express this conflict in such succinct fashion. It is also emblematic of all that is right about Kurbaan. When it stays focused on how its characters feel, the film is honest, plausible and thought-provoking. Where it focuses on the plot, it rings false.

Consider, for instance, the scene where a law enforcement officer has just survived a blast that has killed many of his co-workers and bystanders. The plot demands that he keep moving. But his character needs some time to get over the shock. And sure enough, we see him slumped against the seat of his car, trying to gather himself. Only gradually does he get back in action. On the other hand, a character who needs to make a crucial decision about which wire to cut in order to defuse a bomb (the most enduring staple of movies with bombs in them) is not shown agonizing about it — he has seconds to go, and he makes a snap decision as he must.

As true as these scenes are to their characters, there are ones that undermine them as well. An important supporting character is a liberal-minded Muslim who decides to extract a measure of revenge from the terrorists who were responsible for his fiance’s death — his choices are among the most problematic in the movie. The intention is good — create a character who represents the moderate face of Islam and put him in a scenario where he has to deal with the same rage that the terrorists deal with. There is so much that one could do with a premise like that. Some scenes, like one at a sandwich place, show promise. But on the whole, the character development feels rushed, implausible and somehow inorganic to the plot. It doesn’t help that Vivek Oberoi’s performance isn’t up to the standards set by the rest of the cast.

Kareena Kapoor gets the sort of role that most actresses would salivate about, and does it justice. She has a moment right at the end that echoes, in a strange way, the ending of Last Tango in Paris — what she does with it is pretty much why a number of big name directors seem to want to work with her. Why she chooses to flaunt a size zero figure when she has talent to flaunt instead is something I will never understand.

Saif does exactly as well as one expects him to do these days. His character is written as one who plays his cards close to his chest, and there is hardly an actor working in Bollywood today who can play that kind of role better. But this turns out to be a troublesome strategy. There is a moment where he makes an unwise choice that makes us wonder — would such a dreaded terrorist make such a stupid move? It is possible that he simply made a mistake as a result of the pressure he was under. But by not letting us see how that pressure affects him, we are led to think of it as an implausible plot development.

The two key supporting performances come from Om Puri and Kirron Kher. Puri is in top form as usual, but it is Kher who surprises — she doesn’t get this sort of role often, but she makes us wish she did.

The production quality is quite good — these days, one doesn’t expect less from a big production house like Karan Johar’s. The music (Salim-Suleiman) is sparse and well-composed. Apart from the quality of the writing, there really isn’t much to complain about. But isn’t that enough?

Still, I can’t help but like the movie. The movie doesn’t ask any easy questions. Kurbaan provides an ending, but it doesn’t delude itself into believing that it offers an answer.

A day before the movie was released, a TV channel carried an interview with Saif Ali Khan where he said, “Terrorism has become a reasonable way to die. When we hear that an aunt is dying of cancer, we feel sad, but we get over it because we have seen it before. The same is happening to terrorism.”

Implicit in that statement was a certain sadness that it has come to this. He is right. Maybe it has to be personal for us to care, to react. Then again, isn’t that true of terrorists as well? Like the character says, hum kaun se kasoon-vaar hain?

ps: Having said all that, here’s a rather less complimentary review by Beth (who clearly loves Bollywood despite its many faults, God bless her) and an absolutely hilarious comic strip version that makes me nod in agreement simply because I’m laughing too hard to argue. Beware of spoilers, though.

 

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

My wife recently got a stack of Mills & Boon novels from a friend and basically devoured them over a couple of sessions. Seeing them reminded me of the problem I’d always had with M&B — neither is it good writing in service of a love story, nor is it sufficiently raunchy to fit in the other category. So what exactly is the appeal? Don’t bother, I probably just have the wrong plumbing to understand it.

Anyway, when I see M&Bs, I am usually reminded of Kevin Smith. Why? Because he’s a bleeping good writer of both romance and raunch. Most of the time, he’s expounding on Star Wars, the more arcane causes of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the gayness of popular fictional characters (Archie & Jughead, Frodo & Sam etc.), all of it interspersed with more f-words than you can shake a bleeping stick at. But while you’re reeling under the profane verbiage, he manages to sneak in moments of true romance that remain in memory long after everything else has faded.

On top of which, he seems to have an uncanny knack of making his women unforgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever been impressed with Joey Lauren Adams in any movie other than Chasing Amy. Even if all the world recognizes her as either Arwen or as the girl who romped around with Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s Crazy video, I will always remember Liv Tyler as the video shop girl in Jersey Girl who got bored easily. Heck, he got J-Lo and Ben Affleck together on screen for 5 minutes and they were luminous. Tell me, who else has managed that?

And now, Elizabeth Banks as Miri. The woman is gorgeous, has an absolutely wonderful laugh and does justice to the profanity-laced dialogues that Kevin Smith comes up with. After having languished on the fringes for a number of years now, Banks is finally coming into her own as a leading lady to watch out for. I’d love to see how well she does in more serious roles. But when it comes to playing women in the Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow universe, in her own words, she can “Meryl Streep the s*** out of this thing”.

Seth Rogen, that pudgy actor who has pretty much made a career out of playing lovable losers, plays her best friend and housemate Zack. When the two of them find themselves flat out broke, he hits upon the idea of making a porno with the two of them in it. The fly in the ointment — apart from all the obvious ones you might think of, and a few you didn’t have the imagination to come up with — their friendship has been platonic thus far. They manage to convince themselveas that they can convince their genitals to do the deed without their heads and hearts making a big deal out of it. But of course that doesn’t happen. When does it ever?

Outside of the rather unique way in which these complications arise, this is standard rom-com material. Other than the lesbian angle in Chasing Amy, I’d say that Smith has hardly ever been imaginative when it comes to his love stories. A big reason why they work is that his leads are usually very articulate and evenly matched. You want them to end up together if only so that they could keep talking.

While the plot chugs along to its predictable conclusion, Smith has plenty else to keep us distracted. Craig Robinson plays the financier of this little enterprise and finds among the best reasons to say “I love the movies”. Erstwhile porn star Traci Lords plays a character called Bubbles — rarely do people have a better introduction scene in the movies. Jeff Anderson (Randal from Clerks) plays the cameraman who finds that there are occupational hazards he might not have ever dreamed of. Justin Long and Brandon Routh make a cameo appearance that absolutely had me in splits — I don’t think Long has ever been funnier in any of his past work. But topping them all is Jason Mewes (Jay to Smith’s Silent Bob in the earlier movies) who manages, right at the end, to teach us that one can never presume to know everything there is to know about sex. Smith ought to file a patent for the Dutch Rudder — it’s unique, useful and non-obvious. Even to Traci Lords, I suspect.

ps: No, I’m not telling you what it is.

 

Boggarts beware!

No, not Humphrey. I mean Boggarts with two g’s, the magical creatures that will take the shape of that thing you fear the most. The method of banishment involves thinking of something funny, pointing your wand and saying Riddikulus! If none of this makes sense, you might want to borrow a set of Harry Potter books from somewhere and get cracking.

Now, in case this Boggart thingy isn’t fictitious and there is a ghost of a chance that it might pop out of your cupboard and scare the crap out of you, I suggest you watch Zulm Ki Hukumat at least once. It is an Indianized remake of The Godfather with Govinda in the Al Pacino role (playing a character called Pratap Corleone Kohli), Dharam-paaji in the Brando role and Paresh Rawal in what can only be called a critical value-addition to the script — a fake Swamiji who deals in drugs. He even has a disciple (Archana Puran Singh) dressed as a sadhvi who, when the situation necessitates an item song, will change into something that Cher might’ve discarded as being too trashy.

For best effects, watch it every week. You will radiate such an aura of induced ridiculousness that Boggarts will find some other cupboard to haunt. I’m guessing that Govinda in a gold jacket and a yellow waistcoat that has a huge heart symbol on its back might also work as a patronus.

ps: Oh, and by the way, Aamir Khan did a Godfather remake as well — I think it’s called Aatank Hi Aatank, and features him with slicked back hair and a cheroot in his mouth and looking like a brand ambassador for Isabgol. It might not work as well as Zulm Ku Hukumat but might serve in a pinch.

 

 

Thin isn’t always in

I just got a glimpse of Nigella Lawson on Discovery Travel & Living. Like I mentioned in my earlier post on Julie & Julia, watching people cook isn’t really my thing. But for Nigella, I am willing to make an exception. In the interest of not getting kicked in the shins by my wife, who is sitting nearby, I shall not rhapsodize.

Anyway, the reason I write is because the woman looks distinctly thinner this time around. I’m sure this is healthy for her. I might even bring myself to be happy for her.

But the truth is, the basis of her appeal is the fact that she makes stuff that would send dieticians shrieking in horror, eats it all up (sometimes even wakes up in the middle of the night to do it), and — here’s the important part – looks all the better for it.

At least that’s part of her appeal. The other part… well, I promised I wouldn’t rhapsodize.

 

Weekend watch: Julie & Julia, All the Best

Just in case anyone ever accuses me of not having enough variety in my diet. Now, on with the reviews:

Julie & Julia

Imagine you’re a guy, and a vegetarian to boot. And someone told you that there’s this movie, about two hours long, featuring two women (and a couple of men by way of supporting cast) cooking for most of its running length. That there’s no plot to speak of really, and no major emotional upheavals. And that the climactic moment involves cutting open a duck and stuffing food in it. How likely is it that you’d drop everything to go watch this movie?

Let me sweeten the deal for you a bit. It stars Meryl Streep, who manages to keep her lead over Kate Winslet in the Oscar nominations race by the simple expedient of doing something brilliant enough to get nominated every year. It also stars Amy Adams, who seems to be closing in on Ms Winslet froom the other end. On top of which, it has Stanley Tucci, who is constitutionally incapable of disappointing.

Still, it’s a lot of cooking and very little plot to cram into two hours. Most people would give it a miss. Most did, if the box office receipts are any indication. I didn’t. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, I found myself engrossed in this simple tale of two women — one who blazed a trail by introducing French cuisine to servant-less Americans in the 1950s, and another who followed it half a century later by cooking her way through the former’s cookbook in a year.

Since I saw it on Sunday evening, I have been trying to figure out why I enjoyed this little movie so much. All I can come up with is this: the movie correctly identifies the secret to good food. It’s butter. Lots of it. Bon appetit!

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All the Best

All the Best takes the zany plot of Kaadhala Kaadhala (or Right Bed Wrong Husband, depending on who the makers want to give credit to), adds a bit, subtracts a bit and eventually comes up with a comedy with roughly the same hit rate. Much of it is due to the fact that the plot is madcap enough to cover a number of flaws.

The leads aren’t really in top form: Ajay Devgan (if he wants to stick that extra vowel where the sun don’t shine, that’s his business — I’m keeping it where it is) is just about okay, and needs to progress beyond the silly smile at some point if he wants to become a good comedian. Fardeen Khan seems, inexplicably enough, to survive in comedies despite the fact that he has the comic timing and voice modulation of the average dead bacterium. Bipasha Basu shows less cleavage than Ajay, but looks gorgeous nonetheless. Mughda Godse takes all the brownie points she earned for Fashion and blows them up here — if there is anything worse than how her role is written, it is how she plays it. Sanjay Butt looks like he ate a whole shark on the sets of Blue and hasn’t crapped it out yet.

But making up for all of this is a comedian who I confess I have never been a huge fan of: Johnny Lever. Playing a mute loan shark named Tobu, he brings the house down every time he appears on screen. How he communicates through his sidekicks is funny enough. But how one of them has trouble with “translating” what he “says” after having sustained an ear injury — that bit is almost Pythonesque in its mix of logic and wierdness. If the rest of the movie had managed to live up to that standard, I’d have been grabbing random strangers on the road and buying them tickets to this movie. As it stands, I can only suggest that you go watch it for Johnny Lever and forgive the rest.

ps: If you do watch it, look out for the reference to Slumdog Millionaire — it’s priceless!

 

Freeze Frame #140: The Shawshank Redemption

First things first. If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption so far, please do the following:

1. Compulsory: Find a DVD of the movie and watch it. If you happen to live in a small town where the only available copy of the DVD is with a curmudgeonly octagenarian neighbour of yours who insists on watching it every night and wouldn’t even dream of giving it to you, even for a few hours, go online and order yourself a copy. I know you were expecting me to suggest that you kill that cranky old coot, but remember: any man who would watch this movie every night deserves to live, whatever his other qualities.
2. Optional: Once you’ve finished Step 1, consider reading the rest of this post. I plan to discuss a big spoiler here, so don’t tell me you haven’t been warned.

I’m serious about this, okay? Really, don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.

Now that the formalities have been dispensed with, let me get on with it.

The Shawshank Redemption spends most of its running time in establishing the steady rhythm of prison life. Even the establishment of Andy’s innocence and the jailer’s subsequent cover-up is done without unseemly haste. By giving itself space to breathe, the movie draws us in so surely that we find ourselves as “institutionalized” as the inmates themselves.

Apart from the pacing, which is a brave choice for a Hollywood movie, the other interesting choice is the use of a voiceover narrative. That the voice is that of Morgan Freeman, who plays one of the inmates and Andy’s closest friend, is definitely a plus. But narratives in general are tricky: if you don’t do it right, it would just seem like you just didn’t write the scenes well enough and needed the help of a narrator to explain things.

If you’ve read the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), you will notice that the narrative follows the novel’s text to a good extent. A lot of it is in terms of commentary on a particular scene. In the one where Andy locks himself up in the room with the public address system and plays a Mozart opera on the loudspeakers, Red (Freeman) says:

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Now, this is beautiful prose, but it doesn’t add anything to what you already realize when you see what happens. Like I said, redundancy. But then, a curious thing happens. Maybe it’s the timbre of Freeman’s voice, but you grow used to hearing it in the background. You begin to look forward to it, even if all it provides is a postscript to the events unfolding on screen.

I didn’t notice this on my initial viewing. Not even in the next couple of times after that. But there was this moment recently, when I was watching the movie on TV, that it struck me. There is a scene where Andy seems to have lost all hope, after the warden ensures that the only man who could’ve helped exonerate him is silenced. Red learns that Andy is now is possession of a stout length of rope, and lies awake all night worrying about whether his friend might have been pushed too far. And sure enough, the next morning at roll call, Andy doesn’t step out of his cell.

Darabont paces this scene deliberately, drawing out the suspense until we finally see the inside of Andy’s cell and find nobody there. It is a nice little moment of surprise, because nothing has really prepared us for it. But that is all I felt at that moment: a bit of surprise. A little later, you hear Red’s voice, over a montage of shots of the subsequent manhunt:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison.

Even today when I watch The Shawshank Redemption, I find that Andy’s escape really registers emotionally only after Red has said spoken of it. I guess in some ways, it’s another form of institutionalization.