Daily Inspiration Quote by Alex Cox

Alex Cox pulls off a neat double move here: he skewers critic worship while still tipping his hat to the thing being worshipped. The line reads like a gripe you’d hear at a bar after a screening, but it’s calibrated. He names the Goodfellas tracking shot (the Copacabana entrance) because it’s become cinema’s most over-cited party trick: one unbroken glide that critics can point to as “pure filmmaking” without having to wrestle with messier questions like ideology, glamor, or complicity.

Cox’s subtext is less “that shot isn’t impressive” than “look how criticism turns craft into proof of sainthood.” “The critics were all over this” isn’t about the shot; it’s about the economy of praise, where a single technical flourish gets flattened into a résumé bullet for “genius.” That word matters. “Genius” is both a compliment and a conversation-stopper, a way to close the case. Cox mimics that reflex, then undercuts it by immediately repeating it: “Scorsese is a genius.” The repetition is the joke and the critique. He’s showing how easy it is to slide from noticing a camera move to canonizing an auteur.

Contextually, this comes from a director steeped in the politics of style: Cox made films that wore their choices on the surface, skeptical of prestige consensus. His point isn’t to dethrone Scorsese; it’s to expose how the culture of cinephilia can confuse awe with analysis, turning a virtuoso hallway walk into a whole theory of greatness.