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" Every once in a while with Twitter, you find something that breaks through the bilge and recrimination. Or sometimes, something finds you. One night, 'The Mechanics of History' found me. "
Wesley Morris
History
Find
You
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" 'Get Out,' of course, is the surprise hit movie that Peele wrote and directed about a black man named Chris, who discovers that his white girlfriend's family is running a nasty racist conspiracy. "
Wesley Morris
Family
Man
Out
" The Huxtables laughed and bonded and debated and lip-synced. They were glamorous and simple and extraordinarily human. And affluent. And educated. And so many different kinds of black. You'd think that all of that would make them the Howard University of African-American family life. But white people wanted to matriculate, too. "
Wesley Morris
You
Simple
People
" Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy. "
Wesley Morris
Boss
Vision
Music
" Ms. Sciorra is a member of a dwindling fleet of actors who actually sound like they come from somewhere. In her case, 'somewhere' is Brooklyn. In most movies, and perhaps especially in a handful of singeing 'Sopranos' episodes, 'somewhere' makes her vital. She's what you'd call an around-the-way girl. "
Wesley Morris
Movies
She
You
" 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
Movies
Perception
Youth
" 'Lady Bird' probably doesn't need more attention than it has gotten. It's a perfect movie, and some of its perfection is in its casting, but this is a movie crammed with wonderful work by people who aren't Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan: people like Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and, yes, that Timothee Chalamet. "
Wesley Morris
Perfection
Perfect
Bird
" I feel like I've always approached criticism with a degree of morality, right? Like, not as a moralizer, but just as somebody who wants to make sure that the culture we're getting is at least morally aware of how it's functioning. "
Wesley Morris
Feel
Culture
Criticism
" When Oliver Stone and Woody Allen came forward to express sympathy for Mr. Weinstein, everybody rolled their eyes at them, too. "
Wesley Morris
Sympathy
Eyes
Too
" '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
Hair
Better
Good
" My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods. "
Wesley Morris
Mother
Try
New
" This country is rich with awful things to say about everybody. There's a slur for you and a slur for me - more than one. And because we're terrified of dealing with them head on, we've made them just as easy to warp and defang. "
Wesley Morris
Easy
Rich
Say
" In 'The One Who Falls,' three women and three men, in everyday clothes, negotiate each other while moving, often in unison, on a giant spinning tile. "
Wesley Morris
Moving
Men
Clothes
" 'In Bruges' featured two hit men on a chatty stroll in Belgium, and certain people's passion for it is fit for Valentine's Day. But it was Tupperware Tarantino to me. "
Wesley Morris
Day
Me
Men
" 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
Fool
Woman
I Love You
" One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors. "
Wesley Morris
Feel
Good
Care
" When a black person is acting up or showing off, somebody might say she's 'wilin' out.' In sports, an athlete who really takes it to another level has entered 'beast mode,' which happens to be the nickname of the former Seattle Seahawks superstar Marshawn Lynch. "
Wesley Morris
Black
Acting
Sports
" My father didn't do a lot of direct education. My mother was the direct educator. She would put on these movies on American Movie Classics when we got cable, after my parents got divorced, which took like four or five years. "
Wesley Morris
She
Education
Mother
" Most Pixar films are better than most live action films. "
Wesley Morris
Pixar
Action
Better
" 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
Relationship
Black And White
Black
" You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there. "
Wesley Morris
Women
Men
Scenery
" Suddenly, stories of abuse and harassment are being believed; abusers and harassers are being toppled. Yet, at the same time, one of the top movies in the country right now is 'Daddy's Home 2,' which has a biggish, comedic part for Mel Gibson. He's the man whose anti-Semitism and racist rants became part of the cultural lore. "
Wesley Morris
Country
Movies
Home
" There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things. "
Wesley Morris
Past
Illuminate
Current
" Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era. "
Wesley Morris
Mood
Create
Movies
" If Judge Steven T. O'Neill sent Mr. Cosby away for the rest of his life, that sentence couldn't undo what he's convicted of having done to Andrea Constand, his accuser in two trials. It also can't undo what he once did for me, which was to make me believe in myself. "
Wesley Morris
Believe
Rest
Myself
" A week before Thanksgiving, my mother bought the turkey, frozen. Then she froze it some more. Then she let it thaw and cleaned it - and I mean really cleaned it, because nobody wanted a 'dirty bird.' She salt-and-peppered the turkey, buttered, paprika-ed, and nominally stuffed it. "
Wesley Morris
Bird
She
Mother
" Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York. "
Wesley Morris
New York
American
Art
" 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
Family
Race
Success
" Spare a thought for 'Suburbicon' as it swiftly vanishes from America's megaplexes. This is George Clooney's movie about - well, I'm not sure. It's supposed to be the sort of movie that doesn't get made much anymore: starry, not that expensive, 'middlebrow.' "
Wesley Morris
Much
Well
America
" 'Bloodlight and Bami' is all verite. The director Sophie Fiennes began filming Ms. Jones in the mid-2000s and simply observes her on stage and off. She follows her home to Jamaica, where the diva mellows, almost unconsciously, into a daughter, sister, and parishioner. "
Wesley Morris
Her
Home
She
" Sunken-place entrants include Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, sometimes Kanye West, and any black person with something nice to say about President Trump. It's more generous than 'sellout' and less punitive than 'Uncle Tom,' a dis and a road to redemption. "
Wesley Morris
Tiger
Road
Black