Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 109
March 9, 2017
Screening Room: ‘Personal Shopper’
Equal parts behind-the-scenes fashion narrative, thriller, and improbable ghost story, Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is one of more curious and rewarding movies of the spring.
After playing a few festivals last year, it’s opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:
The year is young still, but you probably won’t see a wiser, more headlong dive into the world of high fashion and celebrity than Olivier Assayas’ slippery, darkly glamorous Personal Shop...
March 7, 2017
Screening Room: ‘Kong: Skull Island’
It’s been a few years since King Kong was smashing up the planet. Fortunately, the makers of Kong: Skull Island have remedied this problem with a half-gonzo reworking of the old giant apt smash-’em-up material set in the waning days of the Vietnam War.
Kong: Skull Island is opening wide this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
This is a movie so eager to show off its skyscraper-sized primate that it trots him out before we’ve even gotten to the credit sequence. In this iteratio...
March 6, 2017
Reader’s Corner: ‘Iraq + 100’
[image error]When it comes to science fiction from the Arabic world, there isn’t much to speak of. The new collection, Iraq + 100, in which authors were asked to set their stories in an Iraq 100 years in the future, is one of the few additions to that limited canon.
Iraq + 100 is on sale now. My review is at The Millions:
Unlike almost every other book you will find out there about Iraq right now, the ambitious new short story collection Iraq + 100 has little to say directly about all the nation’s recent...
March 5, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Forget to Read
[image error]Brilliant, longtime critic Laura Miller was interviewed recently by Poets & Writers. One of their first questions was about a statement she’d made about preferring reading to writing.
We live in a time when everyone wants to write and seemingly no one “has time” to read. Everyone wants to speak and increasingly few people want to listen. People sometimes scoff when I make this observation and claim that aspiring writers read more than anyone else, but that is not my exp...
March 3, 2017
Weekend Reading: March 3, 2017
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Protesting in Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, or 15 other states? Soon it might be illegal to do so, “economic terrorism” and all. The border patrol, customs, and how America’s new immigration policies could be the nation’s next Abu Ghraib-like moral debacle. So when customs asks you for your ID on a domestic flight, do you have to comply? And the award for bird-killingest building in America goes to… “They really want to blow this place up”: The deconstruction of the State Department has alr...February 26, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Go Shopping?
So there are lots of different kinds of writing programs out there. Depending on your location and availability, most are worth applying to because we could all stand to get paid to hang out somewhere and write on our own for a little while.
But how about shopping? As part of its twenty-fifth birthday, that great temple of consumerism, Legos, and fried walleye, the Mall of freaking America, is now sponsoring its very own Writer-in-Residence program.
The Writer-in...
February 25, 2017
Reader’s Corner: Vote Now
[image error]Instead of just announcing what the new all-city book club selection is going to be, New York took it to the people with OneBookNY. They chose five possible books and are asking people to vote on what they think everyone should read.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz The Sellout by Paul Beatty A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty SmithCouple interesting choices here. Coates...
February 24, 2017
Weekend Reading: February 24, 2017
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If the Great Cheeto were more competent, we’d really be in trouble; also, how his courtiers push a diet of flattering media to keep the boss from Tweeting all the damn time. For these folks, everything is going just fine and all the complainers need to shut up already. The “Trump Slump”: Fewer tourists coming to America. When H.R. McMaster argued with Rumsfeld that the Iraqi insurgency was alive and well, Rummy would fax him pages from Che Guevara’s memoirs to argue, No it isn’t. Taking a m...February 23, 2017
Quote of the Day: Book Burning
[image error]When the verbose and gloriously opinionated J.K. Rowling had the temerity a few weeks back to tweet her thoughts on President Tiny Hands’ travel ban, the pushback was about the same as what happens whenever an athlete ventures into the realm of politics.
The conservative troll brigades swarmed and told Rowling the usual things: Stick to writing, woman, and stop saying what you think about anything. (Nevermind that her Harry Potter books are all about tolerance and the acceptance of minorities...
February 19, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Be Ruthless
[image error]When William Faulkner was interviewed by The Paris Review in 1956, he was asked whether writers need to be “completely ruthless.”
The sage of the South replied in the affirmative, with vigor:
The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writ...
