21st Favorite Movie - The Shawshank Redemption

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

When this movie came out, no one and I mean NO ONE saw it coming. It wound up earning a paltry $18 million, $7 million less than it cost to make, and it didn't win a single Oscar. I think more than anything, the title kept people away. C'mon... 'Shawshank'? If you haven't seen the movie, you might think the movie is about a lamb bone. And now, it is ranked #2 overall on the imdb.com list of 250, receiving an average rating by users of 9.2. Only The Godfather is ranked higher. And the part that kills me is that most of them still don't give Stephen King any credit for writing the short story that was adapted into the film.

Bethany is taking a mentoring class right now and one of their assignments was to pick a movie from a list that the professor came up with that featured mentoring relationships. One thing though was that you could not pick a movie that you already seen. Astoundingly, one of her classmates had never seen this movie before. How is that possible? Do they not have USA or TNT where it is aired at least weekly? Have they never met one of the thousands of people who have rated this movie so high on imdb.com? Are they Amish?

As you can see this has become one of the most widely loved movies of all time. No one dislikes The Shawshank Redemption. And pretty much no one has never seen it before. Since you have all already seen it and already love it, I don't need to go into detail here. Plus, Bethany and I are going to dinner in the city tonight with a friend of hers from her Japan team, Tim N. So I gotta get ready. I'll leave you with my favorite quote from the movie:

"Get busy living... or get busy dying."