Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 18

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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Reader’s Corner: Best Graphic Novels of 2023

Publishers Weekly‘s annual critics poll of the year’s best graphic novels came out today. I was one of the lucky contributors who put in their two cents. Happily, some of my favorites made the cut, such as:

Reader’s Corner: Best Books of the Year

It’s that time of year when a writer’s mind turns to best-of lists. And so we have the annual PopMatters best books feature, which compiles arguments for some of their writers’ favorite fiction and nonfiction titles of the year. I contributed several of the books that knocked my hair back this year (The Deluge, Brooklyn …

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Screening Room: ‘The Crime is Mine’

Francois Ozon’s absolutely smashing new movie, The Crime is Mine, opens in late December. My review for Slant Magazine is here: François Ozon’s fizzy comedy The Crime Is Mine, a loose adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play Mon crime, begins with murder, poverty, and a suicide threat. But the film delivers this material with …

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Writer’s Desk: Watch Some TV

Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) does not have a lot of patience for the more precious kinds of writing practices out there. He told Esquire: I think a lot of people have this idea that you can only write if you have hours at a desk, if the conditions are right, if you have …

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