Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 123

Screening Room: ‘Bad Moms’

The summer’s latest rowdy-femme comedy hits screens tonight, so get ready.

My review ofBad Moms is atFilm Journal International:

Five years after Jake Kasdan’s Bad Teacherfound easy jokes in the then-taboo sight of middle-school teacher Cameron Diaz showing up to work hung over and mocking her students, the pocket genre of films and TV shows about women in positions of authority shirking their responsibilities (“Bad Judge,” anyone?) seems to have hit a peak. In Bad Moms, writing and directin...

Screening Room: ‘Zero Days’

With all the news the last few days about not just the thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee but the possibility that the hack was directed by a foreign power (and a certain presidential candidate’s request that that power do yet more hacking), the as-yet mostly theoretical idea of cyberwar has suddenly hit the mainstream.

In a rare convergence, Alex Gibney’s prescient documentaryZero Days hit theaters just a couple weeks ago. My article, “DNC Hack Could Make Zero...

Screening Room: ‘Cafe Society’

Jesse Eisenberg goes to 1930s Hollywood in Woody Allen’s latest time machine romantic comedy. All the outfits are fantastic and the jazz (of course) is hot.

Cafe Societyis playing now in limited release. My review is atPopMatters:

Café Society is nearly done before it gets off a halfway decent joke. Not that it’s been trying too hard before then to be funny, or anything much in particular besides reheat some old Allen material and stir it around before calling it a day. You get the sense tha...

Writer’s Corner: Finding Beauty

Bill Cunningham, the legendarily sharp-eyed and self-effacing fashion photographer forDetails and later theNew York Times, died a couple weeks ago at the age of 87. His was an extraordinary life and worth checking up on (particularly this fantastic documentary), even if fashion and photography aren’t your thing.

He had a lot of things to say about art, creativity, and finding your way in the world as somebody who cares passionately about those things and wants to pursue them with dignity.

Tak...

Weekend Reading: July 22, 2016

Rudy Giuliani’s encore. When Harlem and Dublin resonated with revolution. In all the times Neil deGrasse Tyson has been stopped by police or security, it was more likely to happen when he was entering the physics building; never the campus gym. And here are some times that Sen. Tim Scott has been stopped and hassled by Capitol Police while he’s trying to get to work. Trying to get a mortgage in St. Louis? Good luck if you live in a mostly minority neighborhood. So why does Mike Pence...

Comic of the Day: Archie Meets the Ramones

Screening Room: ‘Ghostbusters’

So, yes, there’s a new Ghostbusters movie. You may have heard about it.

My review is atEyes Wide Open:

It’s bad enough when a classic film is sullied by a subpar remake. (Hint: anybody excited about the Antoine Fuqua The Magnificent Seven, be prepared for disappointment; at least the original, itself a Seven Samurai riff, had the good sense to relocate from Japan to Mexico and cut its own trail.) All those tens of millions of dollars spent, just to tarnish a good and enjoyable memory. Even m...

Quote of the Day: Money and Happiness

In London’s pseudo-newspaperThe Telegraphlast January, for an article on personal finance, the interviewer asked Monty Python’s Eric Idle whether money can make you happy.

His reply:

No, but it can buy you things that do, like holidays and wine.

Writer’s Desk: Hemingway and the One True Thing

Ernest Hemingway (photo by Lloyd Arnold, 1939)

Much of a writer’s life is taken up with various anxieties: Where’s the plot going? That paragraph seems a little flat, should I give it another shot? Is the check in the mail?

That means, then, that a lot of what constitutes writing is working through those anxieties, lassoing them to your work as needed.

InA Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway described what he did when dead-ended on a story:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and t...

Weekend Reading: July 15, 2016

New memoir labeled as story of “White Savior Barbie.” ‘Voluntourism: “We ought to acknowledge the truth that we, as amateurs, often don’t have much to offer.” Everyone’s favorite half-governor invents the year’s newest, bestest word. Guns, guns everywhere – which side are you on? The new American soccer culture, giving suburbia its faux hooligan snarl. The link between gun-control opposition and racial resentment. New book by quote-inventor and text-recycler Jonah Lehrer deemed a “nonfict...