Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 29
September 18, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Billy Wilder’s Rules
After Cameron Crowe failed to convince director Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sunset Blvd., too many other classics to mention) to play a small role in Jerry Maguire, the two struck up a friendship. That turned into a series of conversations. That turned into a book. That book contained Wilder’s rules for …
September 15, 2022
Streaming Review: ‘The Rings of Power’
The first half of the first season of Amazon’s expansion of the Tolkien universe, The Rings of Power, have streamed and as yet not a single ring in sight. This, and the heavy reliance on Galadriel (pictured) is probably a good thing. My review is at Slant: The pressures of trying to retain fans of …
September 11, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Keep Wasting Time
As this Tom Gauld comic strip shows, those writers who appear to be simply killing time by wandering about, pondering, wandering some more, are in fact working very hard on their writing. Sort of. Keep an eye out for Gauld’s awesome new collection of literary-minded comics, Revenge of the Librarians, when it comes out in …
September 9, 2022
Screening Room: ‘See How They Run’
Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan head up the superb cast of the new mystery caper See How They Run, which opens next week. My review is at Slant: Set in London in 1953, the film busily corkscrews a whodunnit and a narrative about mismatched cops into the behind-the-scenes machinations around a planned movie adaptation of …
September 8, 2022
Screening Room: ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’
A follow-up to his 15-part series on the history of cinema, Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: A New Generation covers how the movies look in the 21st century (Mad Max: Fury Road to Pedro Costa essay documentaries). It opens this Friday and is a glorious good time. My review is at Slant: It’s hard …
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September 7, 2022
Screening Room: ‘A Compassionate Spy’
A Compassionate Spy is the latest documentary from Steve James (Hoop Dreams). This time, he tells the story of Ted Hall, the most consequential spy at Los Alamos most of us have never heard of. It’s making the festival rounds now and should be released later in the year. My review is at Slant: A …
September 4, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
Everybody expects writers to be, for the most part, miserable. This is particularly true of writers themselves. We are after all a cohort of people given not only to romanticizing what we do but at the same time highlighting just how difficult a task it is to write sentences one after the other. Michael Cunningham …
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August 31, 2022
Reader’s Corner: ‘Survival of the Richest’
In the first chapter of Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, he describes a strange event he was invited to in 2017 where five wealthy men asked him about the impending apocalypse. They were not curious about how to stop it but how to escape it: Taking …
August 28, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Deadlines Help
Writers like to complain. It’s one of our favorite pastimes. We particularly enjoy griping about deadlines. How unreasonable they are, how foolish we were to agree to them, how we couldn’t possibly get everything done before them, and so on. But, against our nature as it might be, there are times when we should embrace …
August 25, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Breaking’
My review of the movie Breaking originally ran earlier in the year after its Sundance premiere when it was still titled 892. It’s getting a limited release now and is worth seeking out, particularly for featuring one of the final performances from the late great Michael K. Williams. You can read the review at Slant: …
