Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 165

Reader’s Corner: The Books Facebook Users Love

Does this list say something about who’s using Facebook? In yet another of the listicles that they’re famous for, BuzzFeed shows the Top 20 books most beloved by Facebook users. With the exception of the number one pick (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone?), it’spretty much what you would expect:

Great Modern Novels I Had ToRead InSchool But Actually Liked (1984, The Great Gatsby)
Books That I Read 50 Million Times As A Child AndWhisked Me Away Somewhere Magical Each Time (The Lion, the Witc...

Department of Weekend Reading: September 12, 2014

It’s not just Ferguson that needs investigating, it’s the whole county.
2013’s worst Cardinals fan tweets.
What happens after robots have taken everybody’s jobs?Also: how then will people get paid?And: Robot restaurants, coming soon to a strip mall near you.
Literate millennials: More people under 30 years old read a book in the last 12 months then their elders.
Could TMZ win a Pulitzer for the Ray Rice video?
Junk food is better for the environment than healthy food … sort of.
Thirty years later: M...

New in Theaters: ‘The Green Prince’

The art of espionage in ‘The Green Prince’ (Music Box Films)

Wars aren’t fought just by armies and weapons. They also need intelligence, which requires spies, who often need to betray everyone around them. It’s a tricky business.

The Green Prince, about a Palestinian who risked his life to spy for Israel, opens tomorrowin limited release.

My review is atFilm Racket:

Restrained, clinical, and yet full-hearted, The Green Prince is one of the year’s, and maybe ultimately the decade’s, great spy stor...

Screening Room: The Top 5 Sci-Fi Movies That Never Were

Production art from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-produced ‘Dune’ (Sony Pictures Classics)

Sometimes it can be better to think about the possibilities of those great unrealizedwhat-iffilm projects of legend than to actually see them made. Stanley Kubrick’sNapoleon, Ridley Scott’sI Am Legend, Quentin Tarantino’sReservoir Dogs spinoff; there’s a lot of possibilities there for genius, but also insane overreach.

In the interest of indulging thewhat if side of things, I posted a highly subjective lis...

New in Theaters: ‘Take Me to the River’

Even Snoop Dog is in ‘Take Me to the River’ (Social Capital Films, LLC)

Memphis’s deeply knotted influence on American music gets a timely celebration in the new documentary Take Me to the River, opening this Fridayin limited release and then later around the country.

My review is atFilm Journal International:

There’s no end of love flowing off the screen in Martin Shore’s thrilled-to-be-here celebration of the Memphis Sound. That should be no surprise, given the legends that longtime producer a...

Writer’s Corner: Staying Out of the Rain

Crowd at a Harvard-Princeton football game, Nov. 8, 1913. (Library of Congress)

There are plenty of goodreasons to become a writer—exceptingof course a desire for money, fame, or respectability.

In “Phi Beta Football,”afootball-season essay for theNew Yorker about his childhood watching Princeton football games, John McPhee identifies another superb reason to devote one’s life to the written word:

…on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadi...

Department of Weekend Reading: September 5, 2014

Preserving the Ferguson QuikTrip.
Religion as license for discrimination:More Catholic-schoolfacultyfired for being gay.
The last living passenger pigeon’s name was Martha, and she died in the Cincinnati Zoo 100 years ago.
The modern school: What’s a book, anyway?
Yes, looking at those stolen celebrity pictures makes you part of the problem; also this.
On TV, mental illness equals being totallyawesome.
Calling all D&Ders: The fifth edition of the Player’s Handbook is out.
Germaine Greer: Fine author...

New in Theaters: ‘Last Days in Vietnam’ Revisits the End of a Mistake

South Vietnamese try to get on one of the last American choppers out of Saigon, 1975 (American Experience Films / Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)

No wars end gracefully; some end more tragically than others. That truismis elegantly dramatized in thewrenching documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which openstomorrowin limited release.

My review is atFilmRacket:

The stark simplicity of Rory Kennedy’s masterful and Oscar-worthy Last Days in Vietnam stands in contrast to the drama of this complex and littl...

New in Theaters: A Stroll Through ‘Memphis’

Willis Earl Beal in ‘Memphis’ (Kino Lorber)

Musician Willis Earl Beal ambles and agitates through Memphisin thishalf-film and half-art performance piece that feels like something Jim Jarmusch might have done if he’d never left town after shootingMystery Train.

Memphis is opening Fridayin extremely limited release. My review is atFilm Journal International:

Beal is a musician with a cranky disposition and wild talent—that much we can divine. The film is at first a chronicle of his procrastination...

New on DVD: ‘The Normal Heart’ is Heartrending, But Not Enough

Mark Ruffalo in ‘The Normal Heart’ (HBO Films)

Larry Kramer’s 1985 play about the battle for gay equality and visibility in the early years of the AIDS epidemic was finally filmed earlier this year for HBO. It’s less facetious than you might think, given the presence of director Ryan Murphy (GleeandEat, Pray, Love), but can’t quite replicatethe gut-punch experience of the play itself.

The Normal Heart is on DVD and Blu-ray now. My review is atPopMatters:

The facts already seem like a tale out of...