Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 27
December 18, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Make This Your Life
At the end of a talk, playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) once gave, he despaired at being able to provide any practical advice. That is, except for how to procrastinate: I’m undisciplined and unhappy writing and expect to be until the writing stops. I find a remarkable number of things to do in a …
December 16, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Babylon’
Damien Chazelle’s rollicking and ridiculous epic cautionary tale, Babylon, opens next week. My review is at PopMatters: Babylon has buckets of frenzy and excess at a wildly uneven three hours. That is not always a bad thing. Given the mid-to-late 1920s Hollywood setting, low-key would have been a betrayal. It’s the silent era pinnacle when entrepreneurial nobodies …
December 11, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be Boring
Steven Spielberg’s latest, The Fabelmans, is an autobiographical piece about growing up in a fractured family as a frustrated dreamer with no idea of how to do what he cannot stop thinking about: making movies. At one point, the Spielberg stand-in, Sam Fabelman, is interviewing for a television directing gig when the man he is …
December 10, 2022
Screening Room: ‘White Noise’
Many have said that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an unfilmmable novel. Well, it’s a film with Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and even a killer LCD Soundsystem-scored dance number. White Noise is playing now in limited release. It will be on Netflix December 30. My review is at PopMatters: Pity the person asking …
November 27, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Dylan Says Study
Learning anything means practice. It means trying and trying and messing up and circling back and trying again and again. It generally also requires studying those who came before you. Some would criticize this as imitation. Bob Dylan disagrees. In a 2004 interview, he said: It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. If …
November 21, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Love in the Time of Fentanyl’
I reviewed the documentary Love in the Time of Fentanyl from DOC NYC for The Playlist: Almost everything viewers need to know about the mortal consequences of the fentanyl epidemic portrayed in Colin Askey’s new Vancouver-set documentary “Love in the Time of Fentanyl” is contained in one exchange between two users. One man talks about how coming …
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November 20, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Gather Life
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the only novel that poet Rainer Maria Rilke ever wrote, the author’s stand-in is a wandering nobleman and poet who walks the streets of Paris and tries to avoid going mad. In between those struggles, he worries that at the ripe old age of twenty eight, he has …
November 14, 2022
Screening Room: ‘There There’
There There, the latest comedy from Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess) opens later this week. I reviewed for Slant: Writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s There There, a funny and cleverly linked series of dramedic vignettes, doesn’t try to hide the stitchwork imposed by pandemic-period production restrictions. Instead, the film leans into them, creating a schizoid atmosphere that underlies and …
November 13, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Keep Going
Jesmyn Ward, author of the terrific novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, did not have an easy time of getting published. But she stuck with it. She also had a clutch of fellow writers in her corner who told her the right things: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories. Accept rejection …
November 6, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Write Until You Are 25
A lot of writers think they have something to say. It’s part of the reason they wanted to become writers. Some of them are correct. But not all. Unfortunately, the ones who do not have something to say tend not to find out until it is too late. However, there is a simple rubric for …
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