David Denby Quotes

#1. The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart.

David Denby

#2. 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

#3. For many kids, a good teacher may be the most palpable form of honor they will ever experience.

David Denby

#4. The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

David Denby

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.

David Denby

#8. Entertaining the reader is a good function.

David Denby

#9. 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

#10. Used to put movies down by saying that they were 'deep on the surface'
meaning that there was nothing underneath.

David Denby

#11. Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you.

David Denby

#12. The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has.

David Denby

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I was shocked. A dying word, "shocked." Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," as he pocketed his winnings in Casablanca. But it's the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity.

David Denby

#16. Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.

David Denby

#17. But after children leave their parents' arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life and good teachers are still the instigators of that miracle.

David Denby