Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 44
June 12, 2021
TV Room: ‘Monty Python: A Celebration’
There is a nifty four-part show on PBS right now called Monty Python: A Celebration. It’s essentially a plus-sized clip show of fantastic Python bits intermixed with various comics like David Cross and Patton Oswalt reminding us why that troupe of fish-slappers and parrot-killers helped set the stage for almost everything interesting in modern comedy. …
June 11, 2021
Screening Room: ‘In the Heights’
Yes, movie theaters are open again. To put it very simply, we could do (and have done) than have something like In the Heights to kick off the summer movie season. My article is at Eyes Wide Open: This is not the movie that officially re-opened movie theaters. That honor went to John Krasinski’s A Quiet …
June 7, 2021
Literary Birthday: Louise Erdrich
After growing up in North Dakota, where her parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, the part-Ojibwe and part-German Louise Erdrich (born today in 1954) became one of the first women admitted to Dartmouth College. Inspired to write by her parents—her father paid her a nickel a story—wrote numerous books (novels, poetry, nonfiction) …
June 6, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Start a Diary
Michael Palin, of Monty Python and travel-writing fame, has been writing in his diary since 1969. Even when nothing much is happening. Palin is a special case, because he can look back and read about that time he was with David Frost or John Cleese or at some little café in Tangier. Still, for a …
June 3, 2021
Literary Birthday: Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg (born today in 1926) entered American literary infamy on the night of October 7, 1955 at a gallery in San Francisco, when he read his iconic poem “Howl” for the first time. The stage and audience included many other writers who had not quite achieve boldface status (Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder). …
May 30, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Write, Don’t Worry
In Ocean Vuong’s 2020 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, his background as a poet becomes clear in the shards of impressionistic scenery, the free-flowing memory, the jolts of fricative emotion. He also, in one sweet line, asks a question that many writers might think they know the answer to: What if art was not …
May 27, 2021
Literary Birthday: Harlan Ellison
A motormouthed, frantically productive science-fiction writer who made a decent living in the pulps before finding his voice in the genre’s boundary-smashing New Wave period of the 1960s, Harlan Ellison (born today in 1934)—who preferred being called a “fantasist,” thank you very much—had almost as many as opinions as published works. In college, he punched …
May 23, 2021
Writer’s Desk: Rules? What Rules?
So Seth Rogen has a book out. That may surprise some who just think, “The guy from Knocked Up?” He’s almost more writer / producer these days than charter member of the Judd Apatow comedy mafia. Rogen and his longtime friend Evan Goldberg have something of a screenwriting machine going, ranging from instant classics like …
Writer’s Desk: Rules? What Rules
So Seth Rogen has a book out. That may surprise some who just think, “The guy from Knocked Up?” He’s almost more writer / producer these days than charter member of the Judd Apatow comedy mafia. Rogen and his longtime friend Evan Goldberg have something of a screenwriting machine going, ranging from instant classics like …
May 22, 2021
Screening Room: ‘The Dry’
My review of the perfectly okay new Eric Bana mystery The Dry is at Slant: It would be difficult to find a worse candidate for solving the murder-suicide that lies at the heart of Robert Connolly’s The Dry than its hero, federal police officer Aaron Falk (Eric Bana). Not only is he prejudiced about the case because …
