Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 30
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 …
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 …
