Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Racism is old, but Peele found a poetic new way of talking about it. He gave us language we didn't know we lacked. "
Wesley Morris
Way
Us
Know
Related Quotes:
" 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
" We don't yet call it 'Thxgvng,' because any holiday whose centerpiece sits in an oven for four to six hours, after having sat out for as long to reach room temperature, must be spelled all the way out. Cook a turkey. You'll see. This is to say that you're not just roasting a turkey, obviously. "
Wesley Morris
Long
Reach
Say
" 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
" My favorite bad thing about 'Three Billboards' is its ambition to play around with America's ideological and geographical toys. "
Wesley Morris
Three
America
Bad
" 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
World
Look
Failure
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Mr. Clooney has directed six movies; five are set in the middle of the previous century. And 'Suburbicon' clarifies why. Race is a blind spot. "
Wesley Morris
Middle
Why
Race
" 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
" 'Three Billboards,' which is not based on a true story but does have some reality flavoring, must appear worthy of elected office in some way. This was, at first, the illusion presented by the people running the campaigns and, in turn, over the years, has become the custom for lots of us. "
Wesley Morris
True
Reality
Illusion
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The relief of 'Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami' is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. "
Wesley Morris
Grace
Square
Seeks
" There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things. "
Wesley Morris
Past
Illuminate
Current
" 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
" 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
" '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
" 'America's Dad' is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s, he made the black American family seem 'just like us.' "
Wesley Morris
America
Black
Family
" What about Hong Chau? In typical supporting-part fashion, she shows up halfway through 'Downsizing,' already shrunk, an imperious Vietnamese house cleaner with a limp and sharp angles. The movie's satirical cleverness upstages its rage; then Ms. Chau proves she's capable of managing both. "
Wesley Morris
Up
She
Rage
" 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
" The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job. "
Wesley Morris
World
Done
Job
" 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
People
Ideas
Movies
" Standing beneath the white light of an Apple store is like standing on a Stanley Kubrick movie set. His '2001: A Space Odyssey' predicted Jobs and a future where technology was our friend. Kubrick, of course, didn't like what he saw. And occasionally, I have my doubts. "
Wesley Morris
Future
Light
Space
" 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
" Part of what's mesmerizing about 'The Mechanics of History' is its physical eloquence - how dancerly it is. The men don't fall; they float. And when the trampoline restores them to the staircase, they move at a half speed. Cinema, they say, is 24 frames per second. "
Wesley Morris
History
Fall
Men
" American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become. "
Wesley Morris
Culture
Way
Long
" Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved. "
Wesley Morris
Annoyed
Show
American