Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 38
November 16, 2021
Screening Room: ‘The First Wave’
A new documentary from the director of the great Cartel Land depicts the first four months of the pandemic and what it did to one hospital in Queen. The First Wave is playing as the closing night film for this year’s DOC NYC film festival. My review is at Slant: Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave is a …
November 15, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time’
Back in the early 1980s, documentary filmmaker Robert B. Weide decided to make a documentary about his literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut. He shot some footage, the two men hit it off, and soon they were good friends. But the closer Weide (who went on to create Curb Your Enthusiasm) got to Vonnegut, the harder it …
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November 14, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Stuck? Write Something Different
Writers are not born prolific. They work at it. More than most of us. That’s how you end up like Isaac “I lost track of how many books I wrote” Asimov. He got blocked, like the rest of us. But in that moment, he didn’t just sit there grinding his teeth. The asymmetric approach seemed …
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November 9, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Ratcatcher’
The debut movie from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) is a bracing combination of unflinching poverty and expressionist imagery. My review of the new Criterion Blu-ray edition of 1999’s Ratcatcher is at PopMatters: Living in tumbledown council housing blocks, many of the families pine for the day their number comes …
November 7, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Short, Shorter, Shortest
A poet of many talents, including an icy wit and a cross-disciplinary verve, who tends to generate a high degree of excitement in a certain kind of literary enthusiast, Anne Carson is often asked about writing. Rarely does she pretend to be have any great wisdom to impart. In this interview, though, when prompted about …
November 3, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Finch’
In Finch, a somewhat inexplicable science fiction movie about Tom Hanks, a robot, and a dog, the end of the world is just not that big a deal, really. Finch premieres on Apple TV+ this Friday. The kids might like it. My review is at Slant: Finch (Tom Hanks) is a man possessed of a …
November 2, 2021
Reader’s Corner: ‘Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs’
Very happy to have received my copy of the just-published Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs: 100 Discoveries That Changed the World. I was truly fortunate to have been asked to help with the editing and writing of this truly beautiful book from National Geographic about some of history’s greatest archaeological finds. Seriously: Long-vanished civilizations, sunken cities, …
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November 1, 2021
Screening Room: ‘The Velvet Underground’
Somewhere in the great cultural ferment of 1960s New York, a band came together that changed the face of rock and roll. Nobody really noticed but other musicians. But to paraphrase the old saying, every one of those musicians who loved the Velvet Underground went off and formed their own band. My review of Todd …
October 31, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Bring the Emotion
Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn) wrote from a deep, dark place that could traumatize unwary readers. That could be because he deprioritizes anything that does not deal with a character’s emotional state: Very seldom is there any physical description in my work. Occasionally it might be necessary, perhaps for ironic reasons. But physical …
October 24, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Let the Words Come to You
The late Jim Harrison cast the kind of shadow across the literary landscape you don’t much see anymore. A writer more arguably associated with a kind of lyrical American wilderness and wildness than any since Theodore Roosevelt (perhaps Cormac McCarthy), he flung his talents widely across fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He was also a gourmand …
