Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 51
January 7, 2021
Literary Birthday: Zora Neale Hurston
Anthropologist and so-called “Queen” of the Harlem Renaissance Zora Neale Hurston was born today in 1891. She liked giving people varying dates for her birth, invariably ones that marked her as younger. This fooled many writers like Alice Walker, who later helped rescue Hurston’s reputation from obscurity. Hurston most likely crafted this misconception not due …
January 6, 2021
Screening Room: ‘The White Tiger’
In the new movie from Ramin Bahrani (99 Homes, Fahrenheit 451), a kid from a dirt-poor Indian village discovers the price that must be paid to move up the social ladder. Based on the fantastic novel by Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger is coming to Netflix later this month. My review is at Slant: Narrating …
January 5, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Dear Comrades!’
My review of the historical drama Dear Comrades! is at Eyes Wide Open: If history matters — an assumption we might have once taken for granted — one reason is to ensure crucial events are not forgotten due to the march of time. In today’s climate of manufactured truths and glib whataboutism, it is hard …
January 4, 2021
Screening Room: ‘Mosul’
My review of Matthew Michael Carnahan’s movie Mosul is at Eyes Wide Open: One of the most important movies of 2020 is on Netflix right now, but you probably don’t know it. Most people did not notice when the service dropped Mosul onto the service in late November. That was not unusual. A lot of movies were …
January 3, 2021
Literary Birthday: J.R.R. Tolkien
Even though his name would become synonymous with modern fantasy fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien (born today in 1892) only wrote the epic Middle-Earth cycle collected into The Lord of the Rings, when he was not working at his day job, which was professor of literature and language at Oxford. Beyond his love of old …
Writer’s Desk: Invite the Reader In
In her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown“, Virginia Woolf described the phantom form that books can take for writers, a little figure (who identifies in this instance as “Brown”) and says “Catch me if you can.” That infuriating chase makes up the bulk of a writer’s life: And so, led on by this will-o’-the-wisp, …
January 2, 2021
Literary Birthday: Isaac Asimov
The first works published by Isaac Asimov (born today in 1920, a date now marked as National Science Fiction Day) both appeared when he was just 19 and could not have been more different. One was his Columbia University thesis, “The Kinetics of the Reaction Inactivation of Tyrosinase During Its Catalysis of the Aerobic Oxidation …
December 29, 2020
Screening Room: The Movies of 2020
My essay on the cinematic year that was, “2020 Didn’t Kill Cinema But it Didn’t Help”, was published at Eyes Wide Open: This year will be remembered for many things. Sweat pants. Zoom humor. The post-Election Day realization that a solid minority of Americans were in a cult. Warner Bros. selling out its filmmakers (sorry, …
December 28, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Herself’
In the new movie from Phyllida Lloyd (The Iron Lady), a mother of two escapes an abusive relationship and tries to make a new life for her and her daughters by building a new home from scratch. Herself opens soon on Amazon. My review is at Slant: Herself’s home-building subplot is likely what you expect: …
December 27, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Find the Time
John Cheever had a fairly simple formula for writing. He explained it once when meeting a wonderstruck Michael Chabon: Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became and the more books you produced. Excellence plus productivity, that was the formula for sustained success, and time was the coefficient of …
