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 Read Quote
Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity. Wesley Morris Read Quote
Bloodlight and Bami’ delivers. Ms. Jones shucks her own oysters – stressfully. She does her own make up and performs her own vexed yet amusing contract negotiations. Wesley Morris Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Jordan Peele is famous, in part, for imitations – of rappers and dingbats and the 44th president of the United States. But he would be impossible to imitate. He isn’t ribald. He’s droll. Sometimes he’s not even that. Sometimes he’s quiet. Sometimes he’s sitting across from you expecting you to hold up your end of a conversation. Wesley Morris Read Quote
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 Read Quote
