goodLast night and this morning I listened to Frank Darabont's illuminating chat-track on the 10th-anniversary DVD of The Shawshank Redemption. I'm glad he's doing these commentaries finally. He resisted doing them before and carefully prepares for them now. I was concerned it'd be just a recitation of his comments from the Shawshank scriptbook, which I have, but he brought up plenty of other details (including that he's friends with good composer Carter Burwell, of the Coen Brothers' films and Being John Malkovich, and that he had a voice added in production paging "Officer Burwell"). I like that the normally resistant-to-CGI-tweaking Darabont admitted that the 2004 DVD of Shawshank finally fixed a continuity error that had been driving him "nuts" for ten years! (I'd never noticed it, but the warden's wound didn't match where he'd put the gun.)
And of course, The Shawshank Redemption remains a really good film, even filtered through listening to someone chat over it for two hours: the emotional moments still work. I saw the movie on its second theatrical release in early '95, re-released to get it more attention in the lead-up to Oscar nominations, because college friends of mine had seen it the first time and were saying "You've gotta see it!" I wasn't the earliest to the Shawshank bandwagon, but I got on early on, and seeing it finally find its audience in the following year or so was gratifying. (That also was within my first year of being a Stephen King reader, where I was really catching up with the work of someone worth following.)
Last night was also marked by a nice, long chat with
rafaela in Upstate New York. It took two, two, two phone calls to complete! (The first one she was using died on us, so she called back on another one.) 'Twas illuminating as well, and fun.