Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 28
November 3, 2022
Screening Room: ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
The new movie from Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from his first feature, In Bruges. Banshees opens this week. I reviewed for Eyes Wide Open: Given what Martin McDonagh puts his characters through in his latest bloody confabulation, The Banshees of Inisherin, and how poorly they explain and understand …
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October 30, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Story Before Facts
Michael Crichton mastered the art of writing thrilling novels that both seemed like they could happen while stretching reality in ways that gave scientists headaches. The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Congo, these all existed in worlds that were adjacent to science in ways that pushed the thriller plots along but never let the real scientific …
October 23, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Create What You Cannot See
Novelist and new Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux wrote a few years back about the influence of surrealists (Andre Breton, George Perec) on her work in her “formative years.” Part of her fascination seemed to be due to their power to make the ineffable real and graspable. In her piece, “The Art of …
October 19, 2022
Reader’s Corner: ‘What We Owe the Future’
Philosopher William MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe the Future, tries to do what few books do well: Take a big, hairy subject and make it understandable for a broad audience. He succeeds somewhat, but the issue is ultimately with the subject itself. My review is at PopMatters: Many ideas with great potential to cause …
October 16, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Making Pizza Money
Writing is not just one thing. It is many steps. Repeated. Improved. Repeated again. Fantasy author Anne Bishop said as much when asked how she became a writer: It depends on how you define the word. I became a writer the first time I cobbled together a character or two with the wobbly bits of …
October 9, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be Afraid
In this interview from The Rumpus, Darryl Pinckney (Come Back in September, Black Deutschland) explains his pushback against the idea that black authors have a responsibility to write uplifting, noble characters, or that authors in general need to feel constrained by narrative choices: If you’re bored, your readers will be bored. If you’re faking it, …
October 2, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Making It Up as You Go
Back in 1973, Cormac McCarthy was about to publish his third novel, Child of God, and was already one of America’s greatest writers. Few people where he lived in Kingsport, Tennessee had any idea. When a writer from the Kingsport Times-News tracked McCarthy down and tried to pry some wisdom out of the “the mustachioed, …
September 26, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Retrograde’
The year’s second, and likely more memorable, documentary about the slow-then-fast collapse of the Kabul government in 2021 is Matthew Heineman’s Retrograde. It has played some festivals and should hit theaters and National Geographic before the end of the year. I reviewed for PopMatters: Retrograde opens with an eerie pan across distant mountains while American presidents …
September 25, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Find Your Rhythm
If you have ever read Truman Capote (and if you have not, dear reader, why?), you know that he has produced some of the most perfectly calibrated sentences in the English language. Whether he sounded them out in his head, simply knew the music of words better than the rest of us, or learned everything …
September 19, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Escape from Kabul’
The new documentary Escape from Kabul premieres this Wednesday on HBO. My review is at The Playlist: Jamie Roberts’ terse, painfully precise documentary “Escape from Kabul” zooms right in on one episode—the massive last-minute airlift of Afghans and remaining American personnel from Kabul in August 2021—and never looks away, even when you might wish that it …
