Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 36
January 23, 2022
Screening Room: Sundance Film Festival, 2022 Edition
Once again, the Sundance Film Festival (still showing movies virtually) is spreading cheer in an otherwise gloomy month by giving us a glimpse of what is coming our way in the coming year, cinematically. I covered a few of the movies at this year’s festival for Slant here: When You Finish Saving the World (pictured): …
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Writer’s Desk: Nothing Else Lasts
From the epigraph to James Salter’s novel All That Is: There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
January 16, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Follow Your Own Advice
Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville does not seem to be the sunniest person to be around when trying to finish a book. According to this interview in The Daily Beast, his wife has reportedly described his personality while writing as being like “a murderer who’s just come back from a particularly bloody killing.” So perhaps …
January 14, 2022
Screening Room: Fellini’s ‘La Strada’
In Federico Fellini’s breakthrough classic La Strada, a girl from a poverty-stricken family is sold to a traveling circus performer who does not realize just what a miserable life he has consigned both of them to. My review of the new Criterion Blu-ray DVD is at PopMatters: La Strada became a quiet sensation upon its American …
January 13, 2022
Reader’s Corner: ‘Woke Racism’
I reviewed John McWhorter’s most recent book, which came out last fall and became a quick (not surprisingly, given the title) bestseller, for PopMatters: Woke Racism has the feel of something written in a blaze of indignation between podcasts, which is both a strength and a weakness of the text. This may explain the nuggets of …
January 10, 2022
Screening Room: ‘Italian Studies’
In the latest movie from the director Adam Leon (Gimme the Loot), a writer catches amnesia and goes looking for clues through a cacophonous pre-COVID New York. Italian Studies opens this week. My review is at Slant: As depicted in writer-director Adam Leon’s Italian Studies, a successful author’s (Vanessa Kirby) haphazard journey through Manhattan after she …
January 9, 2022
Writer’s Desk: Hook the Reader
Every writer knows the advantage given by a great opening line. Like here: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” “Marley was dead, to begin with.” “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” The best first lines provoke curiosity. What drugs? …
January 2, 2022
Writer’s Desk: What Drives Your Characters?
The great writers make it all seem quite simple. Take John le Carré (the pen name of David Cornwell). When the writer Kate Weinberg interviewed the master spy novelist and they started talking about writing, she confessed to having problems with the novel she was working on: The characters had been living inside me for …
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December 27, 2021
Screening Room: Best Movies of 2021
Didn’t get out to the movies much in 2021? Well, January is just around the corner and that should give you some time to catch up. My year-end wrap-up of things cinematic was published at Eyes Wide Open. Something there for just about everybody.
December 26, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Joan Didion, Full Stop
The luminous Joan Didion, whose sage words on writing we have filched from before for Writer’s Desk posts and most likely will continue to do so in the future, is no longer with us. Absconded from this mortal coil at the age of 87, Didion is now (as the comic Greg Proops might say) swirling …
