Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 6
February 9, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Tell the Truth
Mary Karr’s breakthrough memoir The Liar’s Club was not just a brilliantly written book, pulsing with dark wit and cutting insight, it was also pretty unsparing about herself. Years later, she wrote in The Art of the Memoir about how she started The Liar’s Club on the assumption she’d be telling the story of her …
February 5, 2025
Screening Room: ‘A Complete Unknown’
I wrote about James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown as a folk anti-Western for PopMatters: Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York at the start of A Complete Unknown in the back of a station wagon rather than on a horse. He might as well be a gunslinger showing up in a frontier town that …
February 4, 2025
Reader’s Corner: ‘A Century of Tomorrows’
Glenn Adamson’s absorbing survey of futurology, 'A Century of Tomorrows,' reveals that how societies predict the future says more about the era they’re living in.
February 3, 2025
Screening Room: 2025 Sundance Film Festival
While the Sundance Film Festival still uplifts under-the-radar films in an increasingly challenging market, its future may be in doubt.
February 2, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Make Readers Believe
Every writer is a fantasist. Whether they’re writing a kitchen-sink domestic drama, romance, YA series about talking dragons, or a mystery novel about a blind accountant who solves crimes, the challenge is the same each time: Make readers believe the world you are creating and the people who inhabit it. J.R.R. Tolkien explained the importance …
January 27, 2025
Screening Room: ‘Anora’ Wins Best Picture from OFCS
A good bit of film-related news here: one of my writers’ associations, the Online Film Critics Society, just named Anora the best film of the year. They also paid good attention to Dune: Part Two in technical areas, at least Challengers a couple nods, largely ignored Emilia Perez, and recognized All We Imagine as Light …
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Screening Room: This Year’s Weird Oscar Nominations
I wrote about the 2025 Oscar nominations and what happened as a result of their overloading the list with too many nods to a pair of highly mediocre films (Emilia Perez, Wicked). The article is at Eyes Wide Open: The Oscars can be weird. We all know this. Some of us, despite remembering that strange …
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January 26, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Avoid Interruptions
It seems so obvious and yet turns out to be so difficult in practice. Finding a good writing space is one thing. Carving out the time on a regular basis is another. Ensuring an uninterrupted run of minutes and hours is always harder than you think. But without those blocks of time, creating something new …
January 19, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Kill Your Adjectives
America’s greatest aphorism factory since Ben Franklin, Mark Twain had a lot to say about a lot of things. Since he was a pretty efficient writer, supposedly averaging about 1,400 words a day, Twain thought a lot about the mechanics of his craft. One of his most frequently quoted pieces of advice came in a …
January 16, 2025
In Memoriam: David Lynch
As in many cases, Mel Brooks said it best. Trying to describe the slightly blank Warholian gee-whizness of David Lynch, Brooks called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars.” Our beloved alien is no more, departed at the age of 78. I wrote about his last feature film, Inland Empire, on its release in 2006. Unsure if …
