Wesley Morris, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, will be leaving The Boston Globe for a position at an ESPN-affiliated sports/pop culture website. The newspaper referred to Morris’ “wonderful film criticism and insightful takes on pop culture,” and called his departure a “big loss.”
Along with Armond White, Morris is one of most prominent African-American film critics working today.
A sample of Morris’ work can be found HERE. Most recently, the critic offered a review of Django Unchained that his editors called a “tour de force.
In an interior Boston Globe memo sent yesterday evening, it was announced that Morris will to write fulltime for Grantland, an ESPN-affiliated sports/pop culture website, as The Maynard Institute notes.
Here’s the memo, courtesy of journalist Jim Romenesko’s blog:
From: Most, Douglas S
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2013 6:19 PM
To: !BGHQ-Editorial
Subject: A big loss
There are so many reasons why it’s difficult to write the words: Wesley Morris is leaving us.
All we can do is try to summarize what he’s meant here.
For a moment, forget about the writing. The superb, brilliant writing. Wesley’s presence in our world has been about so much more than just his wonderful film criticism and insightful takes on pop culture. Wesley is a true friend to so many of us. We love him for his infectious sense of humor, his generous heart, and of course his marvelously snappy sense of fashion, as he bounds in from the Red Line wearing one of his many stylish caps.
As for the writing, well, Wesley won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism last year. As the Pulitzer committee wrote, he was deserving “for his smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and the big-screen box office.” Wesley’s love of film, his knack for spot-on observations, his dazzling wit, his imagination, and his passion for storytelling come out in everything he writes. On Christmas day, for example, in a tour-de-force review of “Django Unchained,” he offered this passage: The movie is absurdly violent. When a slave owner is shot up in the opening minutes, the blood doesn’t splatter. It splashes like a bowling ball that fell 50 feet into a full bathtub. The film’s assortment of snipings, bludgeonings, and massacres don’t stoop to Tarantino’s typical fatuousness. Almost every corpse wears a principled toe-tag of vengeance.
His Pulitzer was merely a capstone to a remarkable decade-long run with the Globe. He writes three, four, and sometimes five movie reviews in a week, in addition to longer essays or features for our Sunday Movies section. He has written for Ideas, for the magazine, for Books, and for Food, covering new restaurants in our fondly remembered column Sauce…
Read More: indiewire.com
