Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wesley Morris
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: December 19
Film Critic
Journalist
Podcaster
Writer
the United States of America
Social
Problem
Tease
Ideas
Obligation
Feel
Critics
Feels
Problems
Movie
Responsibility
Black

More quotes by Wesley Morris

Image
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
Image
Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
Wesley Morris
Image
Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.
Wesley Morris
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple bills itself as the antidote to Microsoft. To love Apple wasn't to sell out. It was to buy in. Most people use PCs, but Apple has the mindshare.
Wesley Morris
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.
Wesley Morris
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation.
Wesley Morris
Image
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
Image
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