Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 22
June 13, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Asteroid City’
Wes Anderson’s newest movie, Asteroid City, opens this Friday. It is everything you would expect. Depending on your perspective, that could be a very good or very bad thing. My review is at Slant: A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes …
June 11, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Keep at It
For a Danish Baroness who did not necessarily need to write, Karen Blixen took the vocation seriously. Publishing under the pen name Isak Dinesen, she wrote poetic prose, memoir (Out of Africa), and lovingly crafted Romantic-styled short stories (Seven Gothic Tales). She didn’t feel the need to do things the standard way. As she related …
June 9, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Against All Enemies’
The frightening new documentary Against All Enemies premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. My review is at The Playlist: The MAGA mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 shared many surface similarities with the ideologically opposed mobs that fought against police in American cities over the past few years: improvised …
June 5, 2023
Reader’s Corner: ‘Monsters’ and Liking Great Art by Bad People
My review of Claire Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, ran in PopMatters: One of the great attributes of Claire Dederer’s bracing, funny, honest, yet uneven new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is how rarely (if ever) she uses the word, even though her subject matter aims right at many problematic things. The thesis she wrestles …
Continue reading Reader’s Corner: ‘Monsters’ and Liking Great Art by Bad People
June 4, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Act Like a Martian
The recently late Martin Amis had many attributes: lacerating critic, celebrator of Saul Bellow, caustic satirist (London trilogy in particular), polemicist, standard bearer of what the New York Times once sniffily termed “the new unpleasantness,” and by all accounts an excellent drinking partner. He also provided one of the most cogent definitions of what it …
May 28, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Stress, Anger, and Curiosity
As anybody who has followed Henry Rollins over the years knows, he is just as much a writer as he is punk rock frontman. Having penned everything from poetry and music criticism to travel essays over the years, he has put out a pretty solid body of work, not to mention his own publishing company. …
Continue reading Writer’s Desk: Stress, Anger, and Curiosity
May 26, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Lynch/Oz’
My review of the new documentary Lynch/Oz is at Slant: Is that an Oz narrative?” asks director Rodney Ascher in the second chapter of Alexandre O. Philippe’s trippy, tricky, and obsessive cine-essay Lynch/Oz. Ascher is clearly being a touch dishonest with the question because he’s at that moment referring to Beverly Hills Cop. He follows up that …
May 21, 2023
Writer’s Desk: How Does It End?
Jonathan Lethem does not write simple plots. Try diagramming what happens in, say, Chronic City or his Philip K. Dick homage Gun, with Occasional Music. Good luck! So it’s not surprising that he says he figures out the ending first: I usually live with the idea of a book for years, before I actually know …
May 19, 2023
TV Room: ‘Extrapolations’
My review of the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations ran on PopMatters: One difference between The Day After Tomorrow and the release of Scott Z. Burns’ eight-episode Apple TV+ climate change anthology series Extrapolations in 2023 is that now the human causes of environmental disaster can be openly discussed in a big-budget science-fiction production. The issue has become …
May 15, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Master Gardener’
After making the festival rounds, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener opens next week in limited release. I reviewed for PopMatters: Everything in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener exists at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to reality. The film has one foot planted in a mostly recognizable world but the other in a dreamland of the writer/director’s invention. It makes for a …
