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'Brokeback Mountain' is a sad love story about two people who can't be together, and the reason that they can't be together is because being gay is a stigmatized thing. It would be interesting to have the same movie in which the two guys weren't in the closet and there was no shame about them being gay and they couldn't be together for other reasons. I still feel like we're a long way from that happening.
Wesley MorrisStraight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.
Wesley MorrisIf I like a movie, I'm definitely advocating for it, but it's not "you should see this" or "you shouldn't see this." I try to take a longer view about what the movie is doing and where it fits in the context of other things, in the way that certain good literary criticism tries to do the same thing.
Wesley Morris