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The Green Mile

The Green Mile

List Price: $19.96
Your Price: $14.97
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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An Amazing Movie!
Review: The Green Mile is not the type of movie you watch once. It's the kind of movie you need to see twice, to make sure you didn't imagine how good it actually was. The movie starts slow, takes a while to get to the main story, and once there, it never really picks up speed, but it never fails to amaze. Tom Hanks is great, like always and Michael Clarke Duncan is truly superb!! The entire supporting cast are fantastic as well. Not a movie to be missed!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Must see movie
Review: If you don't like stories about sin and deliverance, don't watch it. If however you are a human being who has considered his mortal plight and shares in the author's desire to ask the big questions, you Must see this. More than any other movie I've seen in a Looong time, this movie portrays the best and worst in man. I agree with another Reviewer that Coffey is a Christ figure, who dies because of human ignorance. This is not a pretty movie. Kids won't like it, and neither will people who don't want to look deeply into the human heart. It's also long, but essentially so. I totally disagree with a reviewer saying it could have been cut 50 min. Every moment was used effectively to draw us deeper into this strange and wonderful story.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: excellent
Review: fast shipping tape is in excellent shape will by from this person again

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Book = Great Film
Review: First off, let me give a word of advice in reference to this movie and all other movies based on books: movies and books are not the same so don't expect them to be so. If you read the book and then watch the movie, comparing all the subtle differences and changes made to the story, you are really wasting your time.

I read the Green Mile and then watched it shortly after and I am conviced this is one of the best film adaptions ever made. The cast is simply amazing, straight out of the book. Michael Duncan Clarke, is John Coffey . . . "like the drink only not spelled the same." Tom Hanks was an even more compelling Paul Edgecomb than in the book. The set design is equally flawless, just how I imagined it as I read the book.

Now to comment on the actual storyline of The Green Mile, the heart and soul of the film/book. The Green Mile is a story which captures the spectrum of human emotion, evoking pain, hatred, sadness and joy. It follows the account of Paul Edgecomb, a warden on prison block E, death row. He witnesses the deaths of many types of men, the pitiful, the deserving and the innocent.

The Green Mile in many ways is an abstract, allegorical retelling of the christian story: John Coffey with the purity and divinity of Christ, Paul Edgecomb an apostle-like witness, the devilish Wild Bill, and Percy, a Judah incarnate. Having said that I won't reveal what happens to these characters, but like the christ story it is both a tragedy and a triumph. And like the Shawshank Redemption, in the darkest situations in life, the human spirit is allowed to shine brightest.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Offensive and Patronizing
Review: This wasn't the worst film of 1999, but it was easily the most embarrassing. Director Frank Darabont leaves no stone unturned in resorting to tired cliches in this fable about this hulking Black man (Duncan) who is on death row for murdering two white girls and befriends a prison guard (Hanks). Through their friendship, it is revealed that Coffey has these healing powers, which, oddly, he uses to save everyone but himself. And yadda, yadda, yadda. The streotypes that emerge in this film are appalling. The performances were okay, but was this really Oscar material? The best thing about this movie is that, at three hours, it's paced fairly well. It goes by so quickly, that you'll hardly realize that you wasted three hours on this preachy, self-important excuse of a film.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Over-rated
Review: Not a bad movie. This is a feel-gooder with some weirdness. The inmate and Hanks are good. You really like the good guys and dispise the bad guys here (that says something) but this is not the be all, end all movie others would lead you to believe.
3.7 stars

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: It's a scary and sad movie
Review: This movie is scary. It's not a good movie for teens or kids. The electric chair scares me. Well kids might like Mr. Jingles the mouse. That's the only part i like. When they get electricuted in the electric chair, i felt scared like if i was in that electric chair. they use a wet sponge and put it on their head and put a black mask on their head so they cant see so it freaks them out more. I can feel how it would be like being in that chair with a wet sponge on my head and a mask that makes my head hot. It's so scary. If you or your kids get scared easisly, dont show this movie to kids. There's nothing really that bad, its just very scary.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Magnificent Stephen King Tale with Pristine CInematography
Review: The story is about a black man, John Coffey, who is accused of kidnapping and savagely murdering two little white girls. He is promptly convicted and sentenced to death. Most of the story is about his time on death row, known in the prison system as, 'The green mile." Judging by his dress at the time of his arrest, John Coffey appears to have been an agricultural worker, a farm hand. He is exceedingly large and, seemingly, simple-minded.

John Coffey was a Christ figure. He was sent to Earth on a mission. He was an innocent who was put to death. His death was not a tragedy. It was part of the divinely ordained plan. God does not permit miracles for the sake of healing people but so that people will believe. John Coffey's mission was to make the prison guards believe.
The Cajun inmate and the white-trash wild man, also on death row, represented the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ. The Cajun, of course, represented the good thief. Taking the symbolism further, the prison guards represented the Roman centurians who guarded the condemned and carried out the crucifixions. In the Gospel, at the death of Christ, one of the Centurians was quoted as say, "Surely this man was God."

When the warden's wife takes her Saint Christopher medal from her neck and puts it around John Coffey's, it strikes me as some a pre-death ritual, like the story of Veronica's vale. St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers-as if the medal was intended to give John Coffey safe travel to the next world.

When an execution takes place, chairs are setup for spectators-press and the family of the victims. When John Coffey is being strapped into the electric chair, a man and a woman in the spectator gallery demand his death and urge it onward. Other heads nod. This is reminiscent of when Christ was brought before the crowd by Pontious Pilate, and people in the crowd started shouting, "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!"

Even the way the story is told has scriptural parallels. The story is told by Tom Hank's character to someone else when he is an very elderly and inform and living in an old-age home. John the Evangelist was in his old-age and living in exile on the island of Patmos when he dictated the Gospel of Christ to a disciple, who wrote it down.

Percy, the bad prison guard, is obviously the devil. Any spiritually minded person watching the movie can practically see his wings flapping. By the time the electrocution of John Coffey is complete, Percy is dead too. With the death and resurrection of Christ, Satan has been defeated forever.

I've just kind-of dashed this review off, but I'm sure there's a lot of other similar analogies.

The mouse...well what can you say about the mouse...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Miles Away
Review: Based on the work of Stephen King, THE GREEN MILE, results in a mixed effort on film. Death Row prison guard, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), and his fellow guards had thought they had seen everything on the "Mile". As it turns out everything about their lives, was about to change when a prisoner named Coffey, (Michael Clarke Duncan) made his way to death row. I have never read King's work, on which this film is based, so I wont be able to compare and contrast the two works. As a film, I was not all that impressed with it, and came away from it thinking that it was just ok. Hanks is one of those actors that seems to play the same role in his films, no matter what the movie, its all Hanks playing himself (lately anyway). Duncan is fine but I don't see what all the fuss was about regarding his performance. By far the best role in the film was the one played by actor Doug Hutchinson as Percy. He is the best part this long winded film Directed and adapted by Frank Darabont, the movie is often too self important for its own good..You could have probably told the same story with more impact with about 50 minutes edited out of the film...

The DVD doesn't have much in the way of extras. Aside from a few production notes, the theatrical trailer, and a very quick featurette, that's it. For me to say that I was quite disappointed here would be an understatmement Rent or buy something else instead Not Recommended, save for Hutchiinson, and the mouse Mr. Jingles

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great entertainment and excellent drama.
Review: While there are a few shortcomings to this film -- mostly in the story and the depiction of certain events. The superb acting by all involved compensates admirably for most of these things; so you can overlook the anachronisms and lapses in taste (the sponge-less execution goes on way too long), and sit back and enjoy what is the interplay among the characters. I personally did not find the film racist. This is set in 1935 and attitudes were different then. And a prisoner in the south was expected to show complete deference to the guards -- or face awful consequences. Overall, this is a film about true magic -- the magic of the human spirit even under dire circumstances. As such it is an admirable achievement by all involved.


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