Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 137

Screening Room: ‘Macbeth’

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (Weinstein Company)

It’s been awhile since anybody has dared make a film of the Scottish Play. Maybe the curse is finally over? In any case, you could do much worse than Michael Fassbender as the ambitious Thane and Marion Cotillard as the scheming Lady Macbeth.

A new and veryatmosphericMacbeth opens this week. My review is atFilm Journal International:

Soaked in foggy Highland gloom, JustinKurzel’s beautifully dour Macbe...

Screening Room: ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

Back in 1975, Monty Python was just starting to get a name for themselves outside of the UK. That was the year their first proper film landed in theaters, and comedy just wasn’t the same after that. Killer rabbits and all.

My review of the 40th anniversary DVD / Blu-ray release ofMonty Python and the Holy Grail is atPopMatters:

Shot by a ramshackle Dadaist comedy troupe over a chaotic and fairly drunken month in Scotland in 1974, right around the time that their Flying Circus TV show was comi...

Screening Room: ‘Mustang’

The sisters of ‘Mustang’ (Cohen Media Group)

InMustang, France’s official entry for this year’s Academy Awards, five sisters living in a remote Turkish village strain against the prison-like limits put on them by a local male culture terrified of allowing them even the slightest hint of freedom.

Wild, exuberant, and altogether masterful,Mustang is playing now in limited release; make sure to seek it out. My review is atPopMatters:

The view from the family home of five sisters living in a remo...

Writer’s Desk: Know Your Audience

Claire Vaye Watkins has a truly astounding piece in Tin House, where she writes with gimlet-eyed precision on not just the infinite ways female and minority writers are put in a box by a white male literary establishment, but on how to write for a particular audience.

She wasn’t shockedthat an older gentlemen came up to her at a signingand said how surprised he was that he liked her stuff. That was her intention:

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain...

Reader’s Corner: Stealing Books

In Islamabad, readers know that when they’re looking for a book, it’s best to check out the Saeed Book Bank. One of the world’s largest bookstores, it’s a three-story institution with nearly a hundred employees that stocks just about everything—and in English, too.According to this profile of the store and its owner Ahmad Saaed in theNew York Times, they once operated in Peshawar, but:

… the rise of terrorism and fundamentalist Islam made Peshawar, capital of the wild frontier lands of Pakist...

Weekend Reading: Thanksgiving Edition

Some Russian bombs dropping on Syrian targets are inscribed: “For Paris.” Have we reached the point where truth in rhetoric actually doesn’t matter? Hey, don’t blame me, I just tweeted it. Thomas Jefferson wanted a day of “fasting and prayer” for December 9. How “Evacuation Day” became Thanksgiving, sort of. Some colonial Americans were so impressed by Indians’ nautical prowess that they thought they were descended from Vikings. Take a look at these Alice in Wonderland illustrations. The Ma...

Screening Room: ‘Carol’

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett exchange Christmas cheer in ‘Carol’ (Weinstein)

In 1952, Patricia Highsmith — riding high after the success ofStrangers on a Trainbut before she started her Ripley series— published hersemi-autobiographical novel about a love affair between two women,The Price of Salt, under a pseudonym. It went on to sell over a million copies.

Now, Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) has adapted it for the big screen as a lush period romance, with Rooney Mara as the inexperienced sh...

Writer’s Desk: ‘A Moveable Feast’

Fans of Ernest Hemingway’sA Moveable Feast love it for its aching and ephemeral beauty. For writers, it’s also a celebration of the craft and (almost more importantly, to some) the lifestyle as it should be enjoyed. For instance:

…we ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

Now, the book has taken on an extra significance in the City of Lights:

Copies have been laid among the flowers and tributes at the sites of the massacres, and...

Weekend Reading: November 20, 2015

Why, oh why: Memento being remade. The dangers of The Golden Notebook: Even novelist Doris Lessing had an MI-5 file. Mmm … Delicious genetically modified salmon. Did these guys actually just propose a religious litmus test for being allowed to enter America? Kasparov: Maybe don’t hop into bed with Putinsofast. And the National Book Award winners are … (Hint: Surprise upset for fiction, not so much for nonfiction) Jesse Eisenberg’s “honest film review.” Sorry, governors, those refugees are sti...

Screening Room: ‘Secret in Their Eyes’

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman in ‘Secret in Their Eyes’ (STX Entertainment)

Based on the Oscar-winning2009 Argentinian film of the same name, Billy Ray’sSecret in Their Eyesfollows what happens when a police woman’s daughter is murdered and neither she nor her fellow cops can quite let go of it.

Secret in Their Eyesopens this week. My review is atFilm Journal International:

After making Shattered Glass, one of the modern era’s greatest journalism films, one would have hoped that writer-d...