Dargis Manohla Quotes & Sayings

I was a Spidey fan as a kid. I always liked the complexity and the teenaged angst that Spider-Man, Peter Parker, always had to deal with. It was kind of a deeper, darker storytelling that just good-guy-beats-bad-guy. — Jack Coleman

It looked like Ben Stiller was one of the showbiz meteorites who was moving so fast he would soon have no worlds left to conquer. — Manohla Dargis

Paprika is evidence that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox. — Manohla Dargis

Moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it's Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger's face into a life. — Manohla Dargis

Mr. Lapid, making an electrifying feature directing debut, traces the line between the group and the individual in a story that can be read as a commentary on the world as much as on Israel. — Manohla Dargis

Created for MTV in 1990, the sharply observed, pop-conscious Ben Stiller Show - featuring its star's lacerating impersonations of Bono, Tom Cruise, and Eddie Munster, among others - subsequently moved to Fox TV and copped an Emmy for writing. — Manohla Dargis

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself? — Colson Whitehead

Graffiti is a lot easier than the canvas actually, because it's such a large format, so when you're going to such a thin detail, it's not that thin in the realm of things because it's such a big wall. This would take a small paint brush of detail, but on a huge wall, if that's the size of a building, the thinnest detail is still that big, it's a quick spray. Spray paint is easiest for me. I love spray paint. — Alec Monopoly

In scene after scene, meaning sneaks in and sometimes roars. — Manohla Dargis

The movie industry is failing women. And until the industry starts making serious changes, nothing is going to change. — Manohla Dargis

The great irony is that women are accused of making romantic comedies, as if it's a bad thing, but [(500) Days of Summer] Marc Webb makes a romantic comedy and he gets Spider-Man [as his next project]. Are you kidding me? You cannot win. — Manohla Dargis

NOTHING SHOULD BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED IN 'EVERYONE ELSE,' WHICH IS AT ONCE LAID-BACK AND RIGOROUSAbout the world we create when we fall in love, and how we navigate the space between us and that separating us from everyone else. — Manohla Dargis

I'll always love Paraguay. It's this most exotic place configured out of the imagination, the whole country.Paraguay will always be a special place in my heart. I go back a long way. I first arrived as a refugee in 1982 from the Falklands War. So it was a safe haven then, and it has become something exotic since then. I feel like I'd like the dust to settle a little bit before going back. — John Gimlette

The great thing about doing art shows is you get to meet the people who are interested in your art, and I think that when you're purchasing a piece of art it's a tremendous bonus to get to meet the artist because you get a chance to pick their brain a bit and find out first hand what the piece is about for the artist. — Paul Stanley

He seems to be in a very bad temper." "Not really. He's always like that to waiters. You see he's a communist. Most of the staff of The Twopence are - they're University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping to bolster up the capitalist system. He's very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular. — Evelyn Waugh

There isn't anything good to say about Kick-Ass 2, the even more witless, mirthless follow-up to Kick-Ass. — Manohla Dargis

Ben Stiller isn't funny - honest. Ben Stiller is very funny, and smart, and cute, too, in a neurotic, New York kind of way. — Manohla Dargis

The New World is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There is some intense, bloodless violence and the beautiful underage lead actress (15-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher) may cause cardiac arrest among some viewers. — Manohla Dargis

In truth, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies - or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers - and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage. — Manohla Dargis

That Ms. Farahani found Mr. Mohassess and persuaded him to share his story is a terrific coup, even if a great deal of his life's work remains elusive. — Manohla Dargis

American commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don't think there has ever been another time when women have been as underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn't genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination. Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal, and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women. — Manohla Dargis

An acquired taste, this dense Jabberwocky-ish word salad is a political allegory about a populace that's been pharmaceutically duped into believing its wretched world is wonderful. — Manohla Dargis

The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life. — Manohla Dargis

By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness. — Manohla Dargis

Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer -
Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema. — Manohla Dargis

Artemis grit her teeth. "I need a favor. I have some hunting to do, alone. I need you to take my companions to Camp Half-Blood."
"Sure Sis!" then he raised his hands in a "stop everything" gesture. "I feel a haiku comIng on."
The Hunters all groaned. Apparently they'd met Apollo before.
He cleared his throat and held up one hand dramatically.
"Green grass breaks through snow.
Artemis pleads for my help.
I am so awesome. — Rick Riordan

I had found The Runaways and I had seen Foxes, and I decided I was just gonna become a juvie, like Cherie Currie. — Courtney Love

Films are for Fridays, books are forever. — Piyush Jha

In 1963 ... The Vatican condemned Dr. No as a 'dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.' Ka-ching! — Manohla Dargis

The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power. The shields that have worked in the past - the order that religion, patriotism, ethnic traditions, and habits instilled by social classes used to provide - are no longer effective for increasing numbers of people who feel exposed to the harsh winds of chaos. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. — John Updike

Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing oftime by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea, and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done as as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that Arabic was able to retain a morphology attested to as early as the Code of Hammurabi, for the nineteenth to the eighteenth century before the Christian era, and to retain a phonetic system which preserves, with the exception of a single sound, the extremly rich sound-range disclosed by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered, [...] — Titus Burckhardt