David Denby famous quotes

04-17-2025

Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates.
-- David Denby

#Sex #Hate #Past
Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.
-- David Denby

#Clueless #Flow #Irony
The director, Antoine Fuqua, relies on small details, which anchor the vigilante-as-saint myth in at least a minimal degree of reality.
-- David Denby

#Reality #Anchors #Directors
Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.
-- David Denby

#Thinking #Intelligent #Rivers
The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes--articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness--it's too shallow to be called nihilism--undermines even the best scenes.
-- David Denby

#War #Eerie #Evil
The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.
-- David Denby

#Buzz #Action #Remarks
Entertaining the reader is a good function.
-- David Denby

#Function #Reader #Good Fun
You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
-- David Denby

#Reading #Writing #Novelists
The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has.
-- David Denby

#Emotional #Criticism #Problem
Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.
-- David Denby

#Fruit #Situation #Theatrics
Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad.
-- David Denby

#Wine #Class #White
Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you.
-- David Denby

#Art #Punk
The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart.
-- David Denby

#Actors #Film #Film Actors

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