re: I just read Kevin Costner turned down the Andy role in Shawshank for Waterworld

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You never fail to be a fricking idiot out of nowhere.

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I posted the obtuse gif as a cheeky play on the thread topic. But seriously, I cannot believe that some people are that... well, obtuse. It has to be willful ignorance.

I can't believe I'm about to deign to do this, but I'm sorry. I respect The Shawshank Redemption far too much to let a claim that it's an example of "wokeness" hang out there without a complete rebuttal.

Morgan Freeman's casting in TSR, far from being an example of the race-swapping bullshite we see today, is actually the exact opposite. How do we know that? Well...

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Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, who were unavailable for one reason or another. The Daily Beast reported that Harrison Ford, Paul Newman, and Clint Eastwood were considered for the role, Ford being Reiner's initial choice

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In other words, the creators of TSR didn't set out with the intent to race-swap Red's character. Rather, they recognized Freeman's persona as a perfect fit for the character and said "You know what, who cares what his skin color is? He's perfect for the role."

That is exactly the kind of meritocracy and color-blindness that conservatives and those "racist MAGAs" champion and pine for.

Remember kids, this movie was made back in the halcyon days when the prevailing philosophy of racial relations was to judge someone by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. In this case, the filmmakers judged Freeman's character...literally

What would a "woke" TSR actually look like?

Gone would be Andy Dufresne, the soft-spoken accountant, and instead we'd have Andrea, a strong and outspoken black woman arrested at a peaceful BLM rally and imprisoned for 20 years under false pretenses; really, the only crime she committed was "being black."

Shawshank is now a women's prison, populated almost entirely by black women and guarded by a leering cadre of white male prison guards, many of whom gang rape the black female prisoners on the regular. The allusion to pre-Civil War slavery is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face; the guards even refer to themselves as "overseers" and at one point one them growls the line "let's lynch this cotton-picking bitch."

The only white prisoner - Red, ironically - is a redheaded lesbian who strikes up a friendship, and then an eventual romance with Andrea, who is bisexual by the way, because of course she is.

Brooks has been replaced by the lady who played the Oracle in the Matrix; a wise matron who once marched alongside MLK, but was likewise arrested and imprisoned for life for the crime of "being black."

In one the movie's most poignant scenes, she counsels Andrea that "nothing will change" until the white patriarchal justice system has been torn down. She later commits suicide (see how faithful to the original they're being?!), enraging Andrea who vows to escape from Shawshank in order to fight back against the U.S. justice system and all the white people who somehow collectively pushed her friend to commit suicide.

Gone are the original themes of hope and friendship, replaced by a supertanker's worth of bitter, angry socio-political commentary and lecturing.

For anyone who was in doubt about what "going woke" means, have I spelled it out clearly enough?

Now is what I wrote a caricature of wokeness? Sure. But look me in the eye and tell me that all of the above haven't been shoehorned at one point or another into existing and once-beloved IP or else crammed into new IP that we're "supposed to like."

Honestly, I'm a bit scared that I've done some hollywood scriptwriter a favor, and that they'll stumble upon this reboot synopsis and copy/paste it to their bosses whilst sporting a raging hard-on.