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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
Watching
You
Want
Related Quotes:
" '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
" 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
" I don't like turkey. I mean, I do. But I don't like it on Thanksgiving. I don't need it. There are about 20 other dishes that get put on a table or a counter or that stay warming on the stove that I'd rather eat than turkey. "
Wesley Morris
Eat
Need
Thanksgiving
" '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
Time
Stand
People
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" '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 don't see a lot, but I think what the movie studios know and what they always know but they kind of ignore, which is that a there's an audience for movies like 'Get Out,' and 'Hidden Figures,' and to some extent 'Moonlight,' which made a lot less money than 'Hidden Figures' did. "
Wesley Morris
Movies
Ignore
Kind
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Most Pixar films are better than most live action films. "
Wesley Morris
Pixar
Action
Better
" 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
" There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things. "
Wesley Morris
Past
Illuminate
Current
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved. "
Wesley Morris
Annoyed
Show
American
" 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
" 'Savage' is a trait that might get you into business school or retweeted 10,000 times. It's what a kid might say after somebody does something awesome or gnarly or fierce: 'Oh, that's savage!' It's the skate park. It's the high-school cafeteria. It's the YouTube comments section. "
Wesley Morris
School
Kid
Fierce
" 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
" I couldn't have known how vertiginous the entire Huxtable project was. I was, like, 10, 13, 15 years old when the show was a thing. But eventually, I could see that Cliff became a play for respectability. 'This is how you comport yourself among white people, young black child. Take a little bit of Howard with you on your way to Harvard.' "
Wesley Morris
Child
People
See
" The relief of 'Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami' is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. "
Wesley Morris
Grace
Square
Seeks