I remember walking out of the theater with a group of my first-year college friends after watching Edward Zwick’s (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) Legends of the Fall when my one friend turned to me and said, “I feel like I just want go in a hole and die now.” Truer words couldn’t have been spoken for, perhaps, the most extensive epic I had seen in a theater until that point in my life. I knew little about the film besides that it starred Brad Pitt (Twelve Monkeys, Se7en), and it could be a darker, more adult-oriented version of the beloved A River Runs Through It. The unknown was just a fraction of what made Legends of the Fall become one of my favorite movies of all time and one that has never fallen out of my Top 50. That is until my 2023 rewatch, some 15 years after I last watched the film.
Category Archives: 1994
Forrest Gump (1994)
It’s hard to think that in a three-year span, Tom Hanks (Big, Saving Private Ryan) went from playing an HIV-infected, highly successful business person who, despite being sick, filed a wrongful dismissal suit against his former employer (Philadelphia) to playing a man with an IQ of 75 who you manages to involve himself in just about every major American event between 1950 and 1980 (Forrest Gump) to the lead astronaut in the suspenseful true story landing of the Apollo 13 lunar mission when, after an oxygen tank explodes, the crew experiences numerous technical issues and tension with each other and the NASA base which, in turn, threatens their survival and safe return to earth (Apollo 13). This would be a defining career for many actors had they not appeared in other movies, but this was merely a three-year span (granted his most incredible three-year span) in Hanks’ career.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Wrongly accused of murdering his wife and her lover, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins – Jacobs Ladder, Mystic River), a young, successful vice president of a major bank, is sentenced to serve back-to-back life sentences in Shawshank State Penitentiary never gets too down in his circumstances, even though he will spend out his days behind bars. In contrast, his wife’s killer roams the streets free. The legendary fiction horror writer Steven King (The Shining, The Mist) introduced himself to a new kind of audience with this quiet and underrated (at its release) The Shawshank Redemption, a film that is nothing like Pet Semetary, IT, Cujo, Misery, Needful Things, Christine, Thinner, Carrie, Firestarter, Children of the Corn or a host of his other adapted horror novels adapted for film. The Shawshank Redemption is the complete opposite of a horror film. It is the crowning achievement of director Frank Darabont’s (The Green Mile, The Mist) career. This movie has been the highest-rated movie on the International Movie Database (IMDB) in the history of its website.