Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 16
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
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 …
