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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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Wesley Morris
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: December 19
Film Critic
Journalist
Podcaster
Writer
the United States of America
Responsibility
Feel
Feels
Way
Things
Problematic
Address
Addresses

More quotes by 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.
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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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 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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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 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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Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation.
Wesley Morris
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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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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
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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.
Wesley Morris
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Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.
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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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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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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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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Computers are scary. Theyre nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.
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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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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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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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