Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 16

Screening Room: ‘Saltburn’ Didn’t Deserve an Oscar — It’s Still Great

I wrote about the Oscar nominations and the divisive movie Saltburn for Eyes Wide Open: Many great movies are made every year. They just keep coming. Some are hilarious, others make you cry, and very occasionally they might spark a new thought. They do not all require prizes. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn did something nearly every other 2024 …

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Screening Room: 2023 Online Film Critics Society Awards

The Online Film Critics Society, which very kindly counts myself as one of their members, just announced out annual film awards for 2023. In another possible precursor to the Academy Awards, it’s Oppenheimer by a wide margin, with Barbie and The Holdovers getting multiple (very deserved) awards as well. It’s a strong list, no real …

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Writer’s Corner: Investigate Your Characters

We have all heard the advice about listening to your characters. Maybe we should also be asking them questions. David Finkel, whose The Good Soldiers is a masterpiece of empathetic war reporting, talked about how to do this in a 2014 interview: It’s a pretty deliberate process, and a lot of it involves working from …

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Reader’s Corner: ‘Outrageous’

Have you heard that everyone is too easily offended these days? That way back when you could make a gag about whatever you wanted and nobody got upset? Kliph Nesteroff’s buzzy and fun (if a little all over the place) Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars shows how false that narrative is. …

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Writer’s Desk: Dialogue Isn’t Real, It’s Poetry

The thing about dialogue is, it needs to sound real. It must replicate how real people talk. This is what we have been told. But what if that is just not true? George Saunders told Writer’s Digest about an experiment he did once. He hid a tape recorder under the family’s kitchen and listened later …

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Writer’s Desk: What Lenny Said

Since Lenny Bruce was a comic, he wasn’t really considered a writer. But that’s all comics do is write, even if they never put pen to paper. Every bit of their act is crafted, molded, sweated over, and knocked into shape by a grisly process they call “working it out” and your average writer just …

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Screening Room: ‘The Great Dictator’

I wrote about Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for Eyes Widen Open. This is an update of a review from a few years back for filmcritic.com about the two-disc Criterion Collection edition. Review is here: In the controversial-for-its-time satire The Great Dictator (1940), Charles Chaplin plays both an Adolph Hitler-like dictator and a good-natured Jewish barber who …

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Writer’s Desk: What’s the Deal with Writing?

It would be wonderful to think that all Jerry Seinfeld’s ideas come to him while he’s eating cereal just like that. Perhaps not “wonderful” but maybe “reassuring,” because then it would mean that is how writing might be sometimes for the rest of us. No such luck: I still have a writing session every day. …

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Writer’s Desk: Describe Like You’re an Alien

Stuck for how to describe a scene? Forget what you know. Don’t worry about what the reader might know. Come at it as an entirely unfamiliar thing. To do this, Edmund White has some advice: One technique that the Russian Formalists use, and Nabokov and Tolstoy, is called defamiliarization. And the idea is that you …

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Screening Room: Is Anybody Watching Movies in 2023?

I published a piece that’s somewhere between a year-end movie wrap-up, best-of listing, and a look at the state of play around moviegoing. It’s at Eyes Wide Open: In 2019, people bought about 1.2 billion movie tickets. By the time 2023 is done, a little over 800 million tickets will have been sold. That’s an …

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