Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 125

Screening Room: ‘T-Rex’

As if growing up poor in Flint, Michigan wasn’t difficult enough, Claressa “T-Rex” Shields decided to set herself a lofty goal: Becoming the first woman to win a gold medal in boxing at the Olympics.

Shields’s awesomely grippingstory is the subject ofT-Rex, which is playing now in limited release and should show up on PBS in the next year. My review is atFilm Journal International:

Outgoing but tough and pragmatic, Shields is blunt about how she got started at the gym she’s been boxing at si...

Weekend Reading: June 24, 2016

Taxes? What taxes? The Brexit inspires … Texit. Congressman finds new way to ensure that people will keep not liking him. If you’re carrying a gun, you’re more likely to think somebody else is, too. Niall Ferguson connects World War I, Brexit, and the Treaty ofVersailles with his marriage. Nine out of ten Venezuelans can’t afford to buy enough food to live on. The Onion: U.N. warms that Trump could be just seven months away from acquiring nuclear weapons. Print and read: Fear, vuln...

Screening Room: ‘Free State of Jones’

Mahershala Ali and Matthew McConaughey in ‘Free State of Jones’

In 1862, a Mississippi farmer named Newton Knight got sick of fighting for the Southern cause. He gathered a band of like-minded rebels against the Rebels and fought a guerrilla war that (briefly) established a free (of slaves, too) corner of the Confederacy.

Free State of Jones, written and directed bySeabiscuit‘s Gary Ross, starsMatthew McConaughey as Knight. It opens this week. My review is atFilm Journal International:

As the...

Writer’s Desk: Bukowski

Some authors become victims of their own caricatures, regardless of talent. So Hemingway is made the symbol of virile and manly artistry, Proust a languid dabbler, and so on.

Charles Bukowski was no different; and in some ways it was his fault. He is most remembered today as a kind of artful stewbum, churning out novels and poems even while drinking his way to the bottom of every bottle that came his way. His writing was well marinated in the last-call remnants of his alcoholic escapades.

Nev...

Screening Room: ‘Finding Dory’

By the time you’ve read this,Finding Dory, the probably inevitable sequel toFinding Nemo, will have raked in millions. And for once, a preordained blockbuster sort of, kind of deserves to be one.

My review ofFinding Dory is atPopMatters:

Finding Dory at least exceeds expectations, if not the original. As with any children’s sequel, particularly in the corporate-synergistic era when every popular animated property can’t just sit there like an exhibit on a shelf. Those characters need to earn...

Weekend Reading: June 17, 2016

99 percent of federal workers are really great at their jobs. The Texas town with lots of space and tiny, tiny houses. How about $10,000 a year, for everyone? The election could now actually be about the very nature of the country. Oh, so many reasons why creating an NHL team in Las Vegas is a terrible, terrible idea. Sometimes a thing is actually a thing. About one in five people with prescription painkillers have given them to somebody else. Samantha Bee as the “one-woman punk...

Screening Room: ‘Diary of a Chambermaid’

InOctave Mirbeau’s scandalous 1900 novel,Diary of a Chambermaid, he uses the exploits of a canny maid unencumbered by bourgeois morality to satirize the hypocrisies and power games of French society. It’s been filmed a couple times, most famously by Luis Bunuel with Jeanne Moreau in the title role.

Benoît Jacquot’s new version starsLéa Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Color) and is playing now in limited release. My review is atFilm Journal International:

The loathsomeness of humanity is so thic...

Quote of the Day: Virginia Woolf and New Media Distraction

Virginia Woolf reviewed books for years. It was a decent job, and necessary for survival; incredibly one could make a living, albeit a poor one, doing that back then.

But occasionally the whole business of opinionating got to her. In a 1939 essay, she suggested replacing book reviews with a simple stamp of approval or disapproval. In her mind this was better than what she called:

…the present discordant and distracted twitter.

Feel free to draw your own comparisons between her time and now.

...

Screening Room: ‘Do Not Resist’

Following the Ferguson riots of 2014, there was a brief moment where the county noticed that all of a sudden, its police departments—stuffed with billions of dollars worth of military surplus and bristling with body armor, assault rifles, and make-my-day attitude—were looking more like a domestic military.

Craig Atkinson’s sober, occasionally terrifyingDo Not Resist keeps the spotlight on the militarization of American police forces. It’s screening tomorrow nightat the Human Rights Watch Fil...

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Listen to What They Say

Ben Hecht (Culver Pictures)

Ben Hecht, one of history’s great newspapermen and playwrights (The Front Page) before he became that drollest and most cynical of Hollywood scripters (Scarface), never read like somebody who cared a whit about what somebody thought of his writing.

To wit, Hecht’s advice to writers:

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good...