Andy is feeling sassy in the aftermath of Shirt-Bird’s death. So, one day, he barricades the bathroom door while his guard is shooting some brown bullets into the porcelain yard, and commandeers the prison loudspeaker to play a Mozart song. Every single one of the downtrodden, defeated inmates turns his face to the sun, soaking up, with his full body, this fleeting scrap of the achingly brilliant human audacity so long denied him by cold prison walls—as though humans do not need art as surely as we need oxygen, as though we do not bleed beauty as freely as blood.
“I have no idea, to this day, what those two Italian ladies were singing about,” Morgan Freeman intones.
Meatballs, probably.
Andy starts laundering money for the warden’s nefarious extortion schemes, which is a pretty cool prison job. It also brings him ever deeper into the warden’s inner circle, which is not that cool because the warden is a big turd.
Case in point: One day, Billy from Ally McBeal shows up in prison and reveals that—mega small world—he used to be cellmates with the guy who actually murdered Andy’s wife! When Andy takes that hot goss to the warden, hoping to get a new trial, the warden throws him in the hole for two months AND THEN MURDERS BILLY FROM ALLY MCBEAL. (Not sure why Andy expected the murderous warden for whom he’s been laundering millions of dollars to be like, “Yes, I’ll totally help you get out of prison so you can go tell everyone about my mad felonies!” but yeah. You’re totally the smartest guy in prison, Andy.)
At this point, Andy is officially FED UP with this shit. He tells Morgan Freeman that he plans to move to Mexico one of these days, and that if Morgan Freeman ever gets out of prison, he should just go to Buxton and look under the special volcano rock and then he can come live with Andy in his Mexican she-shed. And Morgan Freeman is like, “Oooooooookay. Go lie down, kookaburra.”
Now everyone’s freaked out because Andy’s been “talkin’ funny” and it seems like he’s planning to self-harm out of grief over the death of Billy from Ally McBeal (I know the feeling). AND THEN HE DOES. Only he does it with like a laser or some shit because when the guards open his cell in the morning, dude is STRAIGHT VAPORIZED.
What actually happened is that Andy spent nineteen years tunneling out of the cookie castle with his rock hammer, concealing the tunnel hole behind Raquel Welch’s boobs, and when it was finally done, he yoinked the warden’s outfit and shoes (which seems dubious because the warden appears to be a small little pocket-pal and Tim Robbins is a ten-foot ’squatch, but okay), and crawled through a half mile of poopoo to get out. Then he tattled on the warden to the newspaper and headed to Mexico with $375,000. WHO’S KOOKABURRA NOW, MORGAN?
Cops show up at Shawshank and take Clancy Brown away, and he’s all a-bloo-bloo-bloo-bloo-bloooooo and then the warden shoots himself and then Morgan Freeman is like, “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.” (Hollyweird Fun Fact: that line wasn’t in the script—it’s just something Morgan Freeman said to his assistant when she brought him a salami sandwich in the voice-over booth.)
Then Morgan Freeman has his parole meeting and he NAAAAAILS IT! He gets out of prison and goes to work at the grocery store where Shirt-Bird worked and lives in the same dumb apartment where Shirt-Bird lived and the same shitty white ladies are all, “Um, DOUBLE BAGS,” and his boss is like, “STOP TELLING ME ABOUT YOUR URINE,” and he just doesn’t know how to fit in in this non-prison world. “All I do anymore,” he says, “is think of ways to break my parole so maybe they’d send me back.”
Until, one day, Morgan Freeman remembers that Andy left him a present under some fucking rock in Buxton! And do you know what the present is? IT’S LITERALLY A TON OF BUX!
So Morgan Freeman takes a bus to Mexico and finds Andy on a beach and he’s so excited that he doesn’t even care that his only hat falls in the ocean and the two of them scrub boats together forever. And that’s why Sharktank Rondonald is the first great American bromance. Eleven out of ten. Your mom was right.
RATING: 11/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Know Your Enemy
I know that gen Z has it tough—they’re losing their proms and graduations to the quarantine, they’re on deck to bear the full brunt of climate catastrophe, and they’re inheriting a carcass of a society that’s been fattened up and picked clean by the billionaire class, leaving them with virtually no shot at a life without crushing financial and existential anxiety, let alone any fantasy of retiring from their thankless toil or leaving anything of value to their own children. That’s bad. BUT, counterpoint! Millennials have to deal with a bunch of that same stuff, kind of, PLUS we had to be teenagers when American Pie came out! Fuck/marry/kill: Rudolph Giuliani, Stephen Miller, the guy behind you in chemistry saying, “This one time? At band camp?” nine thousand fucking times per hour for FOUR YEARS MINIMUM. You know you would fuck Stephen and marry Rudy if it meant you got to murder that motherfucker!
What I’m saying is that suffering IS a contest and I DO stand by that and straight teenage boys losing their virginities IS worse than not having breathable air. Okay??????
American Pie absolutely captivated a generation because my generation is tacky as hell. “I have a hot girlfriend but she doesn’t want to have sex” was an
