Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 17
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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January 23, 2024
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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January 22, 2024
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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January 21, 2024
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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January 18, 2024
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. …
