Ask Mick LaSalle: My friends love ‘Shawshank’

After asking over 50 friends and acquaintances, “What is your favorite movie of all time,” the most common answer was “The Shawshank Redemption.”

There were always people who loved it, but they took a while to multiply.

[...] if they tell you that it would wreck the purity of their response to analyze it, tell them that they can’t hide their intellectual vacuity behind delusions of superior emotion.

Are these people all around 35, and did they see it when they were 14 (an impressionable age)?

Common wisdom is that John Wayne was a movie star and personality and not really an actor.

What do you think of Wayne as an actor, and do you have any favorite performances?

When people say that great stars are personalities, not actors, they’re missing the point.

Or Picasso was a personality, not a painter? I’m not an expert in classical music, but I can identify a piece by Beethoven, even if I’ve never heard it.

What are you encountering in any of these cases but personality, manifested through some sort of technical means, but personality all the same?

Dear Mick LaSalle: I have to totally disagree with your comment regarding the music from “The Graduate”: “I don’t have enthusiasm for the use of Simon & Garfunkel ... which I think is overdone and dates the movie.”

Uh, you do realize you’re making my point, right? I say the music dates the movie, and you say my opinion isn’t valid because I was a little kid when the movie came out.

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