Wesley Morris Quotes

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.

‘The Tree of Life’ is a collection of conversations that lost souls and true believers have with themselves while keeping their heads to the sky. But the movie is church via the planetarium.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.

Sidney Lumet’s chief preoccupation wasn’t art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.

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.

Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.

‘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.

No, I don’t know why Bobby and Peter Farrelly bothered with a ‘Three Stooges’ movie, either. But if they’re anything like some men I know, their love for Moe, Larry, and Curly (and an assortment of fourth bananas) is deep, abiding, and unembarrassable. In other words: How could the Farrellys not?

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.

Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.

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.

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.

Computers are scary. They’re 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.

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.