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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.

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
Make
Audience
Good
Race
People
Moral
Comes
Problem
Feel
Feels
Something
Movies

More quotes by Wesley Morris

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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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I like Nora Ephron. She wasn't a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.
Wesley Morris
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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.
Wesley Morris
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If I like a movie, I'm definitely advocating for it, but it's not you should see this or you shouldn't see this. I try to take a longer view about what the movie is doing and where it fits in the context of other things, in the way that certain good literary criticism tries to do the same thing.
Wesley Morris
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Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation.
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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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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The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.
Wesley Morris
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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.
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
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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.
Wesley Morris
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Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.
Wesley Morris
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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.
Wesley Morris
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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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Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.
Wesley Morris
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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 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.
Wesley Morris
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Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
Wesley Morris
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Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.
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.
Wesley Morris