Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 28
January 1, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Write For Yourself First
New Year’s Day is usually the time we start making promises to ourselves about what the coming year will bring. Writers are the same. We measure so much of ourselves by what we have produced. This makes us very susceptible to ideas of self-improvement, measurement, holding ourselves accountable, and feelings of letting ourselves down. But …
December 31, 2022
Screening Room: Best Movies of 2022
Now that 2023 is almost upon us, it is time to start catching up on all the great movies of 2022. It’s always a good way to spend a cold January. My year-end roundup is at Eyes Wide Open: Assuming the future still contains books, when one is written about what moviegoing was like in …
December 24, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Use the Holiday
Nobody wants to write over the holidays. Much better to watch the snow, open a book, make some kind of warming cocktail involving rum. Still, we all have our schedules to stick to. So make the holiday work for you. Think about this line from Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory: One by one the household …
December 23, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Living’
What would you do if you discovered you had six months to live? That’s the premise of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, respectfully adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) from Akira Kurosawa’s great Ikiru (1953). Living opens today in limited release and expands around the country in January. My review is at PopMatters: Living keeps …
December 22, 2022
Reader’s Corner: Best Books of 2022
Up above you can see some of the best books that I came across this year. I contributed writeups on each of these to PopMatters annual Best Book feature, which just published this week. You can read the whole piece here.
December 21, 2022
Reader’s Corner: Best Graphic Novels of 2022
Every year, Publishers Weekly solicits the dogged scriveners like myself who cover graphic novels for them with a simple question, “What was good? What was best?” Fortunately, a large enough number of us agreed about the best graphic novel of the year: Kate Beaton’s masterful Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. The full poll …
Continue reading Reader’s Corner: Best Graphic Novels of 2022
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 …
