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The Dictator' lands somewhere between wan Mel Brooks and good Adam Sandler, whose 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan,' about an Israeli Special Forces soldier at a hair salon, manages to strike better contrasts with vaguely similar culture differences - it's a nuttier movie, too.

Wesley Morris

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Wesley Morris
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: December 19
Film Critic
Journalist
Podcaster
Writer
the United States of America
Force
Forces
Strike
Salon
Culture
Somewhere
Contrast
Salons
Better
Whose
Adam
Vaguely
Good
Hair
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Brooks
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Dictator
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Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation.
Wesley Morris
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I have a pretty good sense of when to express misgivings. And white critics are just as capable of pointing those things out and noticing them as people of color.
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The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.
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Straight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.
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Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.
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Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.
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All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.
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Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
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I don't need the audience, but sometimes it's nice to have a gauge - not so I know how I feel, but so I get what is or isn't working for moviegoers.
Wesley Morris
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The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.
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I'm a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.
Wesley Morris
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I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.
Wesley Morris
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Ultimately the social change has to come from the people who make the movies, so the people who make the movies have to look at the landscape and say to themselves, Well, you know, these things are changing, and I'm okay with their having changed, and I think it's okay to start reflecting those changes through the movies we make.
Wesley Morris
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I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it's me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine.
Wesley Morris
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In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.
Wesley Morris
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I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.
Wesley Morris
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Polisse' is the sort of cop thriller where people do things like angrily bang on a desktop or sweep everything off it. If it happens once, it must happen six times. But every time it did, I wanted to stand up and cheer, which I've never wanted to do for any such thriller.
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I do feel a responsibility to address things that are problematic, but I don't have to go out of my way to do that.
Wesley Morris
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There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
Wesley Morris
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A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.
Wesley Morris