Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 55
October 29, 2020
Reader’s Corner: ‘The Town’
In Shaun Prescott’s Kafka-in-the-outback novel, a writer comes to a nowhere town to write on a book that he doesn’t seem to have much interest in or chance of finishing. Meanwhile, a giant hole to nowhere opens up in the middle of town. Things get weird. My review of The Town was published in Rain …
October 27, 2020
Reader’s Corner: ‘A Peculiar Indifference’
My review of Elliott Currie’s A Peculiar Indifference, a sobering book with a very provocative conclusion, ran at PopMatters: An academic sociologist and criminologist who serves up tranches of data to support his points, Currie lets numbers, rather than rhetoric, do the work. And what his numbers show is a crisis with no signs of …
October 25, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Be Brave
When Sylvia Plath was attending Smith College in the 1950s and writing furiously in her journals about the kind of life (writing life, to be very specific) that she wanted for herself, she was absolutely determined to better herself. The entries are filled with orders to herself (“I will learn shorthand”, “I will begin reading …
October 23, 2020
Screening Room: ‘The Witches’
Back in 1990, Nicolas Roeg directed a gruesome, jauntily black-humored adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. It had its flaws but … Anjelica Huston. Robert Zemeckis’ new take for HBO premieres next week. And, well, Anne Hathaway… My review is at Slant: For anybody arguing that the grand potential for boundary-breaking entertainment in 2020’s wide-open …
October 22, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Rebecca’
Not surprisingly, Ben Wheatley’s new take on Daphne du Maurier’s gothic novel Rebecca is just a bit less captivating than Alfred Hitchcock’s. Rebecca is playing now in some theaters and also on Netflix. My review is at Slant: While staying in a posh resort on the French Riviera, an unnamed young woman (Lily James) working …
October 18, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Meet a Stranger for Coffee
Like many performers, Maria Bamford is often stricken with insecurities about her own work. That can make it difficult to write, much less perform. But unlike most writers, Bamford has a unique process for working out her material: In 2018, she began issuing periodic invitations, on Twitter, for fans who live in cities where she …
October 14, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Belushi’
For a few years in the 1970s, John Belushi was one of if not the biggest name in American comedy. Then he blew it all up. The new Showtime documentary Belushi tells the story in dramatic, well-rounded fashion. My review is at The Playlist: “Belushi” can be seen as something of a riposte to Bob Woodward’s …
October 11, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Say It Clean
In his landmark work From Dawn to Decadence, historian Jacques Barzun has this to say about how the readability of written English can be under threat: …the resulting obstacles to good prose were: a vocabulary full of technical terms and their jargon imitations, an excess of voguish metaphors, and the preference for long abstract words …
October 10, 2020
Screening Room: ‘A Rainy Day in New York’
So there’s a new Woody Allen movie out. That’s it. My review is at Eyes Wide Open: Originally set for release in 2019, the movie is now getting a somewhat grudging release in a handful of American theaters, which seems about right. The story feels like a faded Xerox of an idea somebody once scribbled …
October 6, 2020
Dept. of Self-Promotion: ‘What Would Keanu Do?’
Yep, it’s that time of year. Getting close to Christmas shopping season (well, for stores at least it is, actually shoppers won’t be paying attention for another couple months). What, oh what, to get that Keanu Reeves fan in or tangentially connected to your life? May I suggest my latest book What Would Keanu Do? …
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