The Projector #13: I’ve Seen That Movie Too (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

This year marks the 25th anniversary of The Shawshank Redemption. It also marks the 22nd anniversary of the film being either the highest or second-highest rated film on the IMDb’s poll of the greatest movies ever made. (It currently sits atop the list, but it’s traded places with The Godfather over the years.) Back in August, The Washington Post’s Zachary Pincus-Roth explored the phenomenon of the film’s ongoing popularity and unexpected ascent. How did a film that did so-so box office the fall of 1994 come to be hailed as a modern classic?

The article provides two answers: cable and the internet. Shawshank became inescapable on cable in the ’90s, the sort of film viewers would stumble upon flipping through channels then found themselves drawn into. And if they loved it, as many did, they watched it over and over again. Per the Post article, it even became a verb: “Urban Dictionary even has a term for ‘the condition of having been sucked in by a highly watchable movie while channel surfing’: Shawshanked." Elsewhere in the piece, IMDb founder Col Needham notes it “arrived at the perfect time when people were starting to discover great movies and shows to watch via these early online communities.”

It was, in short, the perfect storm to boost a movie like Shawshank, the sort of film that inspires feelings of a deep connection in its fans. Here’s my question: How does this happen now? And I don’t mean that in a gloom-and-doom, things-aren’t-as-good-as-they-used-to-be sense. I think good movies find a way of prevailing. I’m throwing out a question about how films get bolstered into in the 2010s (soon to be the 2020s). Cable is not as monolithic as it used to be, but the internet has grown and grown, while at the same time central gathering places like the rec.arts.movies message boards have faded. And video stores, once a reliable source of discovery, are dead. (I remember watching customer after customer asking for the single copy of Bottle Rocket the store I worked at stocked.) My guess is a film is more likely to pick up fans via ready availability on streaming services, especially Netflix. I saw (and largely enjoyed) the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan shortly after it became available in America in 2017. But since then I’ve talked to people excited to discover it and watched it become a frequent topic of conversation on Twitter, where it periodically gets “discovered” by a new wave of fans. So, apart from obvious sources like the phenomenal podcast The Next Picture Show, where are films that deserve second lives finding those second lives?

Finally, here's this week's suggested reading:

• For Esquire, Simon Abrams wrote about the evolution of John Rambo, from PTSD-suffering Vietnam vet to the personification of American xenophobia.

• For Vanity Fair, Sonia Saraiya explored the legacy of The West Wing, which briefly made liberals highly capable good guys.

• At Uproxx, Mike Ryan talked about the many sides of Roy Cohn with Matt Tyrnauer, director of Where’s My Roy Cohn?

• At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri had a frank conversation about Ad Astra with director James Gray.

• Also at Vulture, Pablo Goldstein reached out to Carl Reiner to discuss the comic filmmaker’s deep affection for The Net and our pal Rachel Handler talked to Kyra Sedgwick about the many mysteries of Phenomenon. 

• At The Ringer, Andrew Gurttadaro talked to Danny DeVito and others in an attempt to assess his multigenerational appeal.

• Finally, for NPR, our own Scott Tobias reviewed The Day Shall Come, the disappointing new film from Four Lions director Chris Morris.