Top Gun, Shawshank added to National Film Registry
It’s a bro-centric year for movies added to the prestigious National Film Registry.
Two of the most popular male-bonding movies of all time — Top Gun and The Shawshank Redemption — are being added to the collection of films preserved by the Library of Congress, the library announced Wednesday.
They’ll be joined by an all-male quartet that’s about to get an all-female reboot — the gang from Ghostbusters.
Each year, the library picks 25 movies to preserve for their cultural, historic or artistic importance. The list is always eclectic and, as usual, includes titles that are older, experimental or otherwise obscure.
And then there are the crowd-pleasers. The Shawshank Redemption is a mainstay atop the Internet Movie Database poll of the top 250 movies of all time.
Its exalted ranking — The Godfather places second — is somewhat curious. Shawshank, a deliberately paced, wellcrafted prison drama about the friendship between a wrongly convicted man (Tim Robbins) and a savvy fellow inmate (Morgan Freeman), was considered a box office disappointment upon its 1994 release. It was the first feature for director Frank Darabont, who adapted the screenplay from a novella by Stephen King. Nominated for seven Oscars, it won zero.
But its popularity increased thanks to home video and countless airings on cable television, where viewers came to appreciate the elaborate plot, poignant score by Thomas Newman and Freeman’s soothing voice-over narration.
The almost comically macho Top Gun (1986) was an instant blockbuster and remains a cultural 1980s touchstone. Applications to naval flight schools soared post-release, and it elevated Tom Cruise to a new level of stardom. Its visual style, from action maestro Tony Scott, helped influence a generation of directors.
Two years before Top Gun, director Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters was also a box office smash, setting a standard for high-concept, effects-driven comedy that was rarely duplicated. Reitman’s gift was allowing improvisational comedians including Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Rick Moranis to riff their way through the movie’s ridiculous spectral set pieces.
A new version of Ghostbusters, with a female spook-hunting crew led by Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, will be released in July.
The film registry, which began in 1989, now includes 675 titles. The library works to ensure that original 35mm negatives will be preserved, either by the library itself or another organisation. The library maintains the negatives at its vast audiovisual conservation centre built inside a Cold War-era bunker in Culpeper, Virginia.
The oldest film added this year dates to 1894. Known as the Edison Kinetoscopic Record Of A Sneeze or simply The Sneeze, the frames were captured by W.K.L. Dickson, who led Thomas Edison’s inventor team. Still images were published by Harper’s magazine, but it wasn’t seen as a movie until 1953.
The most recent registry addition is the critically lauded film noir L.A. Confidential (1997), bridesmaid to Titanic at that year’s Oscars. The library has yet to select Titanic for preservation.