Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 15
February 25, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Make the Book Worth It
In Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, a critic named Walter spends a good part of his day whacking away at the flood of literary jetsam he is assigned to cover. Huxley, through Walter, has fun mocking the mediocrity which makes up much of publishing (“bad novels and worthless verses … insignificant biographies and boring …
February 18, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Do it Because You Have To
In 1940, Sinclair Lewis was in a dry spell, professionally. He was several years past his last notable work (1935’s prescient anti-fascist warning It Can’t Happen Here) and unsure about where to take his career. Visiting an old friend at the University of Wisconsin Madison, he decided to take up a teaching gig there. In …
February 14, 2024
Reader’s Corner: ‘The Great Wave’
My review of The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider is at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “It’s difficult to convey just how strange life in the third decade of the third millennium has become,” Michiko Kakutani writes in “The Great Wave,” her cultural survey of the discontented present. The …
February 12, 2024
Screening Room: ‘Io Capitano’
My review of the Oscar-nominated Io Capitano ran in Slant Magazine: Given the challenges that many migrants face when traveling to a new land, it makes sense to assume that they’re fleeing harrowingly nightmarish realities. But the scenes that director Matteo Garrone uses to open his heartrending Io Capitano are far from nightmarish. Garrone’s big-dreaming migrant characters …
February 11, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Build Your Community
Writing is hard enough as it is. The self-doubt. The sitting. The pondering. The staring into space. The writing. The rewriting. Avoiding the reviews. Reading the reviews. Why make writing more difficult than it needs to be by doing it alone? Tomi Adeyemi explains that as much as writers may think solitude is always the …
February 4, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Ask Questions
Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith isn’t the kind of versifier who aims for small targets. As Smith told Oprah Daily, her work can generally be broken down into attempts to answer a few basic yet crucial questions: “Who are we to one another?” “What do we do …
January 31, 2024
Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘Veni Vidi Vici’
My review of the Sundance Film Festival hit Veni Vidi Vici ran at Slant Magazine: There’s a striking dissonance between the serene and realistic surface of Daniel Hoesel and Julia Niemann’s Veni Vidi Vici and the way it bludgeons its points home using the exaggerated methods of social critiques common to such genre pieces as Snowpiercer or Infinity Pool. How …
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January 28, 2024
Writer’s Desk: Edith Wharton on Critics
Even Edith Wharton had to deal with critics. In her case, since she wrote about “Fashionable New York,” they primarily wanted to know which of her characters was which real person. This was irritating. But that comes with the territory when one has been lucky enough to get a book published and reviewed. People will …
January 27, 2024
Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘Love Me’
The largely animated robot romance Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, had its premiere at Sundance. I reviewed for Slant Magazine: A high-concept vehicle about machines falling in love, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me aims to be a fable about how the detritus left behind by now-extinct humanity could serve as a misleading guide …
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January 26, 2024
Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘A Real Pain’
Jesse Eisenberg’s second movie as writer/director, A Real Pain, just premiered at Sundance. It was picked up for distribution by Searchlight, and is very worth finding once it gets released. My review is at Slant Magazine: There’s enough pain on display in Jesse Eisenberg’s crackling comedy A Real Pain to keep numerous therapists busy for years. It’s …
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