Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 184

Department of Weekend Reading: December 13, 2013

Utility spokesman says new clean-air push will “kill thousands of jobs“, as compared to the thousands of actual lives it will save.
Living in a cul-de-sac is the worst.
When gutless wins.
Boehner’s sick of it.
Planned vs. organic urban cores in the Central Florida downtown smackdown.
How to get ahead in school: be attractive.
How Sweden ruined a perfectly good school system through privatization.
Julie Ruin and the return of Kathleen Hanna (aka Mrs. Ad Rock).
It begins with the Golden Globes: 12 Year...

New in Theaters: ‘American Hustle’

Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Bradley Cooper strut in ‘American Hustle’

After last year’s wildly popular but kinda underwhelming mental-illness romantic comedySilver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell changes things up with the sprawling, polyestered, multi-Golden Globe-nominated, 1970s scam flickAmerican Hustle. Not a bad switchup, all things considered

American Hustle opens this weekend in limited release. My review is atFilm Racket:

Somehow there’s never been a big movie about Abscam, the am...

New in Theaters: ‘Saving Mr. Banks’

Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) cajoles ‘Mary Poppins’ author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) in ‘Saving Mr. Banks’

It’s been a while since Emma Thompson has been a fixture at the Academy Awards; her last win was in 1996 for writing the screenplay of Ang Lee’sSense and Sensibility. That might change now, with her incomparable work in the new Disney biopicSaving Mr. Banks, where Thompson plays the icyMary Poppins author P.L. Travers as she gets humbugged by Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), who’s intent on making...

Writer’s Corner: Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

Born in Iran, raised in Rhodesia, and schooled in London, novelist Doris Lessing was a Nobel Prize-winner, inescapably brilliant, unclassifiable, and a world-class grump. Lessing passed away in mid-November and would have hated all the fuss being made about it. Not because she was necessarily modest, she just didn’t see the point.

There are many writers, particularly those who have received as many plaudits as she had over the years, who would have reacted with much more self-puffery than she...

New in Theaters: ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’

Finally, the Lonely Mountain

For anybody who had just about given up on Peter Jackson’s ever-longer-seeming series of J.R.R. Tolkien films, there comes the improbably namedThe Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Who knows how next year’s final installment will come off, but the secondHobbitfilm mostly chucks aside everything that was wrong withAn Unexpected Journey and relocates the joy of storytelling. Plus: Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens everywhere this...

Department of Awards: ’12 Years a Slave’ Best Film of 2013

Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor in ’12 Years a Slave’

On a snowy afternoon in Manhattan, New York Film Critics Online—a group that very kindly counts yours truly in its membership—met to determine which films that hit theaters in 2013 were great, terrible, meh, or (more commonly) just not great enough.

The headline is that Steve McQueen’s harrowing real-life epic12 Years a Slave took awards for best picture, actor, and supporting actress, while the incomparable lost-in-space thrillerG...

Readers’ Corner: The President’s Book List

Peter Baker, one of theTimes‘ more prolific and thoughtful chroniclers of goings-on in the nation’s capital, published an interesting piece earlier this week on Obama’s reading list. He keeps the psychology to a minimum, fortunately, but does find a few things to parse out here about the president’s personality and how it’s reflected in his choice of reading material:

Unlike many of his predecessors, who devoured American history and biographies, Mr. Obama’s tastes lean toward the literary, in...

Department of Weekend Reading: December 6, 2013

From the vaults: “The barefoot contessa wore rubber thongs.”
New pope: Worst bouncer ever.
North Korea still open for tourism.
Billionaires with Star Trek dreams.
The new isolationism.
Reasons not to steal cobalt-60.
Less than one-third of silent films still exist.
When VHS was all there was.
The crushing disappointment of travel writing.
Print and read: P.L. Travers and Walt Disney.

New in Theaters: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

Oscar Isaac and his not-so-faithful cat in ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

A not-so-faithful take on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early-1960s, the Coens brothers’Inside Llewyn Davis is part sourBarton Finksatire on creative arrogance and partO Brother, Where Art Thou?roots-music extravaganza. It’s either a haunting odyssey of failure or who-cares? kind of thing, depending on one’s mood. Either way, stupendous music.

Inside Llewyn Davis opens this week. My full review is atPopMatters:

There’s li...

New in Theaters: ‘The Last Days on Mars’

‘The Last Days on Mars’: Anybody out there?

Ruairi Robinson pitched his sci-fi horrorshowThe Last Days on Mars as “United 93in space.” That’s a pretty gutsy presentation, not to mention almost entirely miscalculated.

The Last Days on Mars is opening this week in (highly) limited release. My full review is atFilm Journal International:

Outer space is the new haunted house. There was a time when films about first contact involved actual contact—sure, everybody might end up running in terror from t...