Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 14
March 30, 2024
Screening Room: ‘Coup de Chance’
Woody Allen is still making movies. And judging by his latest, he hasn’t lost a step. Coup de Chance opens next week in limited release and then should be on digital pretty soon. My review is at Slant Magazine: Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance starts appropriately with a random encounter and finishes with an out-of-nowhere intervention. But …
March 25, 2024
TV Room: ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’
My review of the new adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres this Friday, ran today in Slant Magazine: Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow was published in 2016, five years before Russia’s top opposition leader (and Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe) Alexei Navalny returned to his homeland and was immediately imprisoned. Showtime’s eight-part adaptation of Towles’s …
March 24, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Three Words About Narrative
Over the course of a rumination about Orson Welles’ late masterpiece F for Fake (which is always worth pinning an essay or two on), Emily St. James breaks down narrative into just three concepts: But: This introduces the idea of opposition. The hero has done something, but the villain has done something to oppose it. Therefore: This …
March 20, 2024
Screening Room: ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’
The new film from Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) is opening in limited release this Friday. Do what you have to do, but find it. Nothing else like it in theaters right now. My review is at PopMatters: As the title of Radu Jude’s new film suggests, things end not with a …
Continue reading Screening Room: ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’
March 18, 2024
Screening Room: ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’
With Dune 2 packing them into theaters, it seemed a good time to lok back at the now 10-year-old documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune for Eyes Wide Open: This never-dull if not always believable bull session lets cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky describe at length his absolutely mad idea for an early adaptation of Dune which never happened. Pavich couldn’t …
March 17, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Be the Reader
What poets do may not seem to have much to do with other kinds of writing. It can seem arcane and abstruse, all those rules or lack of rules and blank space and gnomic pronouncements. Of course, that’s all nonsense. Like anything else, poetry is just the act of putting one word after another until …
March 14, 2024
Screening Room: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’
Something of a festival sensation, the new 1980s’-set bloody desert noir Love Lies Bleeding is rolling out now in limited release. My review is at PopMatters: The story, by Rose Glass and Veronika Tofilska (a director on the television series His Dark Materials), takes the durable Jim Thompson stranger-comes-to-small-town noir template, re-centers it around a same-sex female couple, …
March 10, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Follow That Weird Idea
Against what so many people believe, there are writers who just knock out their book as they go. Outlining? Whiteboarding? Nah. E. L. Doctorow was one of those. He told The Paris Review that Ragtime didn’t start because of deep research or a carefully plotted idea. It was really just an accident: I was so …
March 3, 2024
Writer’s Desk: The Morning Ritual
Some people write when they can snatch a little time during the day. Some take to it in the midnight hour when the house has gone quiet. Others, like August Strindberg, are the morning kind. Get up, make the coffee, a brisk walk, and then to work. Per Sue Prideaux’s biography of the playwright: And so …
February 27, 2024
Reader’s Corner: Christopher Hitchens and the Fights Worth Having
My article on the new Christopher Hitchens anthology A Hitch in Time ran in PopMatters today: A culture’s vitality can be measured by its major figures’ willingness to start fights and spread gossip. Minor or major, substantive or petty, it doesn’t matter. Writers, editors, and artists can best show they care about the life of …
Continue reading Reader’s Corner: Christopher Hitchens and the Fights Worth Having
