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The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Stephen King's best adaptation!!!
The year is 1947. A young Portland banker, Andy Dufresne, is convicted of the murder of Linda Dufresne and Glenn Quintin-his wife and her lover, respectively. Andy is adamant in defending his innocence, but the evidence is overwhelming and he is sentenced to two life sentences in Shawshank Prison. In prison, he strikes up a friendship with a fellow inmate, Red, who has been in Shawshank for 20 years. Red is known as the "man who knows how to get things" and can get almost anything a prisoner could want from the outside world. Andy approaches Red after a month of incarceration requesting a rock hammer in order to pick up his old hobby of rock collecting and shaping.
Shawshank is a cruel and unforgiving environment, with merciless guards, violent outbursts, and frequent instances of sexual assault. Early on Andy becomes the target of persistent rape from a gang called the "The Sisters" and their leader, Bogs. As a way of avoiding this abuse, Andy takes up a week-long job tarring the roof of a nearby factory. While working, he hears the captain of the guards, Byron Hadley, complaining about an exorbitant tax on his inheritance, and Andy sees an opportunity. As a former banker, Andy offers to help Hadley avoid taxation and earns some protection from the bullyish captain.
When Bogs and the Sisters next attack Andy, they beat him up so bad that he is put in the infirmary, but Hadley, newly ingratiated to the former banker, avenges his attack by beating Bogs to a pulp, to such an extent that Bogs gets transferred to a hospital. When Andy returns from the infirmary, he requests a poster of Rita Hayworth from Red, which Red dutifully procures, and which Andy soon hangs on his wall.
As word of Andy's financial expertise becomes more widely known, the warden, Norton, offers Andy a position working in the prison library, where he can better help guards (and Norton) with their financial concerns. There Andy takes an interest in improving the library and helping to educate his fellow inmates, writing to the Senate everyday requesting more books, until they finally cave and meet his demands. At some point, an older inmate, the gentle Brooks, is released from prison into the real world. While it seems as though freedom is all he can ever have wanted, the real world does not agree with the older man, who finds himself in a halfway house after 50 years of imprisonment, and hangs himself in his room.
After Norton institutes a program through which the prisoners can begin working on infrastructure outside the prison walls, he begins accepting bribes from local businesses who fear that prison labor will take away opportunities for their business. Andy hides the money away in a bank account under a fake name, helping the warden launder money for many years.
In 1964, Shawshank welcomes a new inmate, a likable man named Tommy Williams, who becomes a friend of Red and Andy. Andy helps Tommy learn to read and get a diploma, and it eventually comes to light that Tommy knows the person who actually killed Andy's wife and her lover. Seeing a way to freedom, Andy informs the warden of the evidence, hoping for a second trial, but the warden needs to protect his investment and has Tommy killed and Andy put in solitary confinement for 2 months.
When Andy finally gets out of confinement, he tells Red about his dreams of freedom, to live in Zihuatanejo, a Mexican coastal town. Red says it would never happen, but Andy maintains hope and tells Red that if he ever gets out of Shawshank he should go to a place in Buxton to retrieve a package buried under an oak tree.
The next day, Andy's doesn't come out for roll call, having escaped through a hole he has been digging with the rock hammer for many years. He poses as the fake person in whose name all of Norton's money has been deposited, takes the money, and flees to Mexico. In the process, he also tips the police off to Norton's shady business dealings. When the authorities go to arrest the warden, he shoots himself.
After 40 years, Red finally makes parole, and visits the place in Buxton that Andy told him about. He digs up a box full of money and a letter from Andy telling him to come to Zihuatanejo. He does and the two friends reunite.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Tarantino's best work
In a diner, a man and a woman who call each other Pumpkin and Honey Bunny eat breakfast in a booth. Honey Bunny teases Pumpkin for not wanting to commit armed robberies anymore, and Pumpkin explains that robbing the diner would be better than robbing convenience stores or banks. She agrees, and the two leap to their feet and draw their weapons, before the opening credits roll.
Across town, two men in suits named Vincent and Jules ride in a car discussing Europe and fast food. Jules tells Vincent that Marsellus, their boss, allegedly had a man thrown off a balcony for massaging his wife Mia's feet, who Vincent has been instructed to take out to dinner. They argue about the implications of foot massages, before storming an apartment with three men inside. Jules kills one, and recites Ezekiel 25:17 before killing another, named Brett. Vincent retrieves a briefcase, the contents of which glow, from a kitchen cabinet.
In a bar, Marsellus gives an envelope full of cash to a boxer named Butch, bribing him to throw his next match. Vincent and Jules, now wearing tee shirts, enter the bar, and Butch has a brief exchange with Vincent on his way out.
In the following scene, Vincent buys heroin from his drug dealer, named Lance, and talks briefly to his girlfriend Jody. After buying three grams of heroin, Vincent shoots up and heads to Mia's house. Mia does cocaine in the bathroom while Vincent fixes himself a drink. They head to a restaurant named Jackrabbit Slim's, where they talk about Mia's failed television pilot and the foot massage rumor, which Mia denies. Mia forces Vincent to participate in a twist contest, which they win.
Back at Mia's house, while Vincent uses the bathroom, Mia mistakes his heroin for cocaine and snorts it, falling unconscious. A panicked Vincent rushes her to Lance's house, although Lance is reluctant to help. Vincent is able to successfully revive her with an adrenaline shot straight to the heart. At the end of the night, Mia tells Vincent a joke from her television pilot, which she previously refused to divulge, and the two agree to keep the night's events a secret.
A man named Captain Koons visits Butch as a child, giving him a gold watch that is a family heirloom. As an adult, Butch kills his opponent in a boxing match, rather than purposely lose as Marsellus wanted. Butch escapes in a cab driven by a woman named Esmeralda, and calls a bookie named Scottie who plans to collect Butch's earnings. Meanwhile, Marsellus orders that Butch be killed. At a nearby motel, Butch's girlfriend Fabienne waits for him, and the two talk and have sex. The next morning, Butch realizes his gold watch is missing, and angrily leaves the motel in search of it.
Butch cautiously returns to his apartment, and initially finds no one there. He retrieves the watch and notices a gun on the counter. He hears the toilet flush, and kills the man who emerges from the bathroom, which turns out to be Vincent. Butch leaves and is spotted by Marsellus at a stoplight. Butch rams him with his car, and an injured Marsellus chases an injured Butch until both men are subdued inside a nearby pawn shop by the owner, named Maynard.
Butch and Marsellus awaken in the pawn shop basement, where Maynard has bound and gagged them. A man named Zed shows up, who orders Maynard to get "the Gimp," a man in a full-body bondage suit who sleeps in a trunk. Zed drags Marsellus into another room to be raped while Maynard watches, and Butch manages to break free. Butch is about to flee when he hears Marsellus's cries and instead retrieves a katana sword and ambushes the men, killing Maynard. Now freed, Marsellus shoots Zed in the crotch, and tells Butch that the men are even, as long as Butch leaves town and never tells anyone about the incident. Butch rides Zed's chopper motorcycle back to the motel, and he and Fabienne ride away together.
The film flashes back to the scene where Jules recites Ezekiel 25:17, this time from the perspective of an armed man hiding in the bathroom. After Jules kills Brett, the man runs out and fires wildly, miraculously missing Jules and Vincent with his entire clip. Jules and Vincent kill him, and Jules calls the event an act of "divine intervention." The two take Marvin, the only surviving man in the apartment, with them, and leave. In the car, the men continue debating "divine intervention," and Jules pledges to give up his life of crime. Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face, killing him. Jules calls a nearby friend named Jimmie, and they head to his house to deal with the cleanup.
At Jimmie's house, Jules calls Marsellus for help, who arranges for a man named Winston Wolfe to come over and help fix the situation. Jimmie tells the men they have ninety minutes before his wife Bonnie arrives home. Wolfe arrives ten minutes later and instructs Jules and Vincent to wipe down the car upholstery. They place Jimmie's blankets over the seat, and Wolfe hoses a naked Jules and Vincent down in the backyard, before giving them old tee shirts to wear. They follow Wolfe to a nearby auto shop, where the car is destroyed. Wolfe introduces Jules and Vincent to his girlfriend Raquel on his way out of the auto shop, and then leaves.
Jules and Vincent decide to get breakfast at the same diner that Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are about to rob in the first scene. Vincent goes to the bathroom just before Pumpkin and Honey Bunny draw their guns. When Pumpkin demands Jules's wallet and the briefcase, Jules draws his weapon, and explains to Pumpkin that he now understands the true meaning of Ezekiel 25:17, and wants to find a non-violent solution. Vincent emerges from the bathroom, resulting in a Mexican standoff. Jules successfully de-escalates the situation, and he and Vincent leave the diner with the briefcase in hand.
Nightcrawler (2014)
Nightcrawler- embodiment of the American dream
Contrary to what you might have read elsewhere (in a lot of places) the film itself does not suggest Lou Bloom is a psychopath or sociopath or, indeed, exhibits any other mental condition or personality disorder. (Though, of course, he does exhibit certain narcissistic tendencies.) Lou comes with too much willingness to pursue violence to be termed a victim of society, but nevertheless he is what he is less because he was born that way and more because he was molded that way.
The very first words out of Lou's mouth are quite telling:
"I'm lost."
In fact, at that particular moment in that particular place Lou is not lost at all. He knows exactly where he is. On a much grander scale, however, Lou is very much lost. This is obvious by the way he speaks. He doesn't speak like a regular human. Any time Lou has more than one sentence to say to something he slips into a cadence, rhythm and tone that sounds more like a motivational speaker or, even more so, like a guy in front of an audience force to sell himself because he knows the product he's trying to peddle is crap. But, they, America is all about the packaging, right? Because if you don't like what's beneath the wrapper, you can just throw it away and buy something else.
Lou is lost because he has bought fully into the new America dream. Not the old one about finding a good job, buying a house, raising a family and not having to worry about class dictating the terms. The American dream Lou is pursuing is the bumper sticker dream. Lou is all about packaging. There is no core in there and everything he thinks is deep thinking sounds like something you'd see on a motivational poster or bumper sticker:
"Do you know what fear stands for? False Evidence Appearing Real.
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
Why you pursue something is equally as important as what you pursue.
Good things come to those who work their asses off.
My motto is if you want to win the lottery you've got to make money to buy a ticket."
That last one there is particularly insightful because Lou doesn't have a motto. If that's his motto, then you can bet he heard or read it somewhere else. (The one about friends being a gift, by the way, comes from Robert Louis Stevenson, but he meant it in a way completely opposite from how Lou exploits it.) What human being actually speaks like that on a daily basis in normal discourse with others? The answer is those who have taken the lessons the titans of American capitalism have been teaching them literally.
Most of us know that kind of stuff is so vapid as to be meaningless and just laugh it off and go about living in the real world. But Lou caught on to something that rest of us haven't. The titans of American capitalism are vapid and they do it mean and, most important, they don't live in the real world. They live in a world where success is measured only by whether you have more money tomorrow than you did today. That's it, that's all. By that standard, Lou Bloom ends the movie as the embodiment of the American dream. By every other standard, not so much.