Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 117

Weekend Reading: November 4, 2016

Vertical farming, coming soon to a Target near you. If I can’t have the presidency, then nobody can. Here’s how Trump is trying to actually suppress the vote. John Dean (who would know): Trump is more Nixonian than Nixon himself. Not even this yogurt company is safe from the new Nazis (they hire refugees, you know). The other side of Chicago. Coming in 2017 near Dubai: Publishing City. Nope, books aren’t going anywhere. So the FBI might also be looking into Russia’s years-long attempts...

Screening Room: ‘Don’t Call Me Son’

Don’t Call Me Son,the newest film from Anna Muylaert (last year’s incredible The Second Mother), is playing now in limited release. My review is atPopMatters:

The routine for 17-year-old Pierre (Naomi Nero) appear fixed as Anna Muylaert’s Don’t Call Me Son(Mãe Só Há Uma) begins. Each day, shark-like, he fulfills one urge and then the next, dozing through school, ignoring his mother’s motor-mouthed manias, jamming with an amateur garage band, going out to dance, and hooking up with girls. It’...

Screening Room: ‘The Handmaiden’

This Halloween, skip Madea and check outThe Handmaiden. It’s playing now in limited release and is just about the bestchance out there for a good time at the theater: chills, shocks, romance, secret perversions, period outfits, it’s got it all.

My review is atPopMatters:

Nothing is as it seems in The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi). Park Chan-wook’s victorious return to the Korean filmmaking scene after his American debut, 2013’s Stoker, is rife with pungent physicality and nearly overwhelmingly aest...

Writer’s Desk: Start Your Novel Now

November is only a couple days away. And you know what that means: time for National Novel Writing Month!

Pretry simple: 50,000 words in 30 days. Easier said than done, of course, but therein lies the challenge.

So get started! That sci-fi romance series or timely political satire you’ve been pondering won’t write itself…

Reader’s Corner: What the President Read

Recently, Barry toldWired about the books that have shaped him over the years. They broke down his syllabus in typical efficient-nerd fashion, by how long it would take to read. Predicting one could get through Robert Moses’s 1,300-odd pageThe Power Broker in 19 hours seems dubious unless you’re a speedreader.

Still, this list is nonetheless a fascinatingly mixed one, jumping from fiction (a surprising Steinbeck selection) to urban studies (Caro, the book that explains New York City) and envi...

Weekend Reading: October 28, 2016

Remember, guns don’t kill people, toddlers do. 281 things, people, places that/whom Donald Trump has insulted (so far) in graphic form. Attention deniers: the first reports linking pollution and climate change started hitting the media in about 1883. Frank Serpico: Americans are more likely to be killed by their own police than terrorists. Nasty women vote. As fails Trump the man, so fails Trump the brand. Print and read: ISIS, Putin, and the PR flacks pushing the new Taylor Swift album hav...

Screening Room: ‘Inferno’

Well, another year, and another Dan Brown thriller comes to the screen. That would be Tom Hanks on the left as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, and Felicity Jones on the right as his latest brunette sidekick. This time out, Langdon’s hot on the trail of a genocidal madman who loves Dante and wants to destroy humanity. To Florence!

Inferno opens wide this weekend. My review is atFilm Journal International:

“It’s good to have you back, Professor,” says Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) to Robe...

Writer’s Desk: Shakespeare Wrote on Deadline, Too

For his essay on the somewhatnonsensical tendency for modern authors to keep reinterpreting the plays of Shakespeare, Adam Gopnik pointed outthis about the Bard:

Shakespeare grabbed his stories more or less at random from Holinshed’s history of Britain and Plutarch and old collections of Italian ribald tales. As the “ordinary poet” of a working company of players, he sought plots under deadline pressure rather than after some long, deliberate meditation on how to turn fiction into drama. “Wh...

Weekend Reading: October 21, 2016

The Iranian refugees to Germany who are converting to Christianity. Trump-emboldened misanthropes now even ruining Second City shows in Chicago. The 2016 election is a Rubicon that can’t be uncrossed. Fox News’s Shepard Smith says Roger Ailes never hassled him about being gay. Between all the new Star Wars and Fantastic Beasts films, we’ll soon find out just how far fan attention can be stretched. Even if a conspiracy did exist to steal an election by having people vote multiple times, it w...

Screening Room: ‘Keeping Up With the Joneses’

Wonder Woman and Don Draper aren’t sure why they’re here, either.

Don’t you hate it when your humdrum suburban life is upended when a couple fabulously exotic super-spies move in next door? That’s the problem faced byZach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher when confronted by their new neighbors Gal Gadot and Jon Hamm.

Keeping Up With the Joneses opens this week, for better or (much, much) worse. My review is atFilm Journal International:

A subpar knockoff of the kind of tired action-comedy hybrid t...