Sunday, February 10, 2008

The Shawshank Redemption -- second movie at Mosaic





About 20 of us met on Saturday to watch and discuss The Shawshank Redemption. What a great movie! If you haven't yet seen this modern classic, you owe it to yourself to rent it, buy it or Netflix it!
Ryan used the tag line, "Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free," to direct the initial discussion on the main message of the story. As we worked this over, we saw the key theme of hope/fear emerge alongside two minor themes of freedom/imprisonment, and friendship.

Despite the brief moments of prison violence, this is a well-paced and beautiful movie that draws the viewer in because we can see ourself in Andy or Red. We can all identify with having our hopes raised and our hopes crushed. (We can probably all recognize how we have crushed someone else's hope at one time or another.) We can all resonate with friendships -- what would life be without friends? And a promise given to a friend can be a huge motivator for us, as it was for Red, who embraced hope through his friendship with Andy. And we can all identify with time and life wasted as we "hide" or shrink in fear.

A repeated quote in the movie says, "Get busy living, or get busy dying." That's a terrific thought. How are you doing in this regard? Are you getting busy intentionally living, contributing, growing in relationships, getting closer to Jesus? Or are you slowly withering and dying, one second or one day at a time?

If you're interested in looking deeper at the structure of Shawshank, and how this enhances the movie, Ryan found an excellent article on the web:
http://www.webster.edu/~schustjm/shawsh.htm. Finally, look for a trivia quiz on Shawshank coming in the next couple of days on this site and on my Facebook account. (If you have a Facebook account, look me up and friend me.)
Copyright 2008, Martin Baggs

2 comments:

  1. what a terrific meet-up! really, really enjoyed watching this film again. I've seen it so many times but it was great to watch it with a more detailed eye this go 'round. more than anything, I enjoyed the discussion afterwards... much of what was said has really stayed with me this week. I am waking up with 'get busy living' in my mind.

    thank you so much for organizing this... can't wait til next month!

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  2. I appreciate Mosaic's openness to showing movies and allowing us to meet to discuss. We can learn so much from one another; we all come at movies from different perspectives and backgrounds. And that is what makes it so interesting and so much fun.

    Sophie Scholl will be a great movie for Easter!

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