Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 25
April 17, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Somewhere in Queens’
Directed, co-written by, and starring Ray Romano, Somewhere in Queens is opening this Friday. My review is at Slant: Intermittently funny and touching, but ultimately forgettable, Ray Romano’s overcooked family comedy Somewhere in Queens is about a protective couple who can’t quite let their son go. Leo (Romano) and Angie Russo (Laurie Metcalf) fret over nearly everything …
April 16, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Live to Write
Whether the result was nuanced studies of fraught relationships, eye-opening stories of people straining to connect their political beliefs with their lives, or boundary-expanding science fiction, Doris Lessing produced books that were heavy with ideas but also clearly the result of a life fully lived. Lessing, a British-Zimbabwean who led full lives as an anti-apartheid …
Writer’s Corner: Live to Write
Whether the result was nuanced studies of fraught relationships, eye-opening stories of people straining to connect their political beliefs with their lives, or boundary-expanding science fiction, Doris Lessing produced books that were heavy with ideas but also clearly the result of a life fully lived. Lessing, a British-Zimbabwean who led full lives as an anti-apartheid …
April 12, 2023
TV Room: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’
The last season of Amazon’s highly addictive The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a screwball comedy as filtered through Mad Men and mid-1960s Broadway farce, starts this Friday. My review is at Slant: Through its first four seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kept an increasing number of plates spinning at a speed that could leave you at once in …
April 9, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Just Finish It
Despite the legacy that came from from the novel that Alfred Hitchcock used as the basis for Psycho, Robert Bloch never quite achieved notice outside the world of the pulps. Nevertheless, he was a talented writer who rode just about every trend there was, from Weird Tales horror to 1960s genre television. Bloch was also …
April 3, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Air’
Against all the odds, Ben Affleck’s new movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal when he had just started his career is actually not too bad, in a Jerry Maguire kind of way. My review is at PopMatters: A true underdog redemption story with an unexpected kick, Air is about how shambling sports …
April 2, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Do Your Research
During COVID, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion was a surprise streaming hit. That was likely due in large part to its writer Scott Z. Burns’ dedication to research. The movie felt like a kind of documentary all those years later for the simple fact that Burns surveyed all the infectious disease experts he could …
March 27, 2023
Screening Room: A Remake of ‘Vertigo’?
I wrote a self-explanatory article titled “Please, Please Don’t Remake Vertigo” in response to news about a new version being planned by Robert Downey Jr. You can read it at Eyes Wide Open: The real question, though, is not whether a new Vertigo would have value but why make it? Hitchcock was not precious about remakes: He …
March 26, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Go for a Walk
The answer to dealing with many different downturns or challenges is invariably quite simple: Take a walk. As Andrew McCarthy notes in the Times, this simple practice has broad benefits that have been noticed by many learned types: Hippocrates proclaimed that walking is man’s best medicine.’ The good doctor also knew that walking provided more …
March 19, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Have Fun and Carry On
You might think that a writer like Douglas Adams, who not only wrote for Doctor Who early in his career but also collaborated with Graham Chapman and even appeared in a Monty Python sketch, would have no problem with confidence. But as Writer’s Desk has previously noted, Adams was an infamous procrastinator, the kind who …
