Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 69
November 26, 2019
Reader’s Corner: Stan Lee’s Marvelous Life
My interview with Danny Fingeroth, author of the new biographyA Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee, was just posted atPublishers Weekly: What do you think accounts for Lee’s ability to create such an incredibly long-lived roster of characters? Stan is pretty much the only comic creator who the casual person on the street …
November 24, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Keep at It
Like many writers of science fiction, Octavia Butler spent many long years working at her craft while remaining mostly unknown and with precious little to show for it. She is revered today for her classics likeThe Parable of the Sowerand Kindred but for much of her career she toiled in relative obscurity, as so many …
November 19, 2019
Screening Room: Stephen King on Childhood
I’m always more interested in the question than the answer. That’s Stephen King on the weird foreign land of childhood, which so many of us forget the second we are out of it. Listen to and watch the rest here in the PBS animated short series Blank on Blank:
November 18, 2019
Screening Room: ‘The Kingmaker’
The new documentary about Imelda Marcos (who, yes, is still wielding political clout in the Philippines, makes for fascinatingly unsettling drama in unsettling times. My review of The Kingmaker, which is in limited release now and will be on Showtime at some point, is at The Playlist: It is possible, after watching Lauren Greenfield’s fascinating, necessary documentary “The Kingmaker” …
November 17, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Shape Matters
In 2010, Ernest J. Gaines—the late author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—talked about how part of his fiction grew out of listening to the stories of the people he grew up around in Jim Crow-era Louisiana. But, he emphasized, writing is not just about having good material: Content is probably only …
November 10, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Stop Asking Questions
A little while back, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, many Missions: Impossible) noted that he was getting asked the same question by a lot of aspiring screenwriters. Basically: How do I break into the industry? His response was a long Twitter thread that started with the premise, “You’re asking the wrong questions” and went …
November 5, 2019
TV Room: ‘Watchmen’
Damon Lindelof’s wonderfully strange and deeply political Watchmen series is more interested in exploring the further ramifications of Alan Moore’s groundbreaking graphic novel than producing a faithful reenactment. It’s a high-risk move but one that appears so far to be paying off. My article on Watchmen is at PopMatters: The first episode, a direly ironic hour, kicks off …
November 3, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Fit In, Never Explain
The late, irascibly great Nick Tosches was a son of Newark who skipped college, immersed himself in rock journalism at its raucous Lester Bangs-ian height, then went on to write fiction, music biographies (Dean Martin, Jerry Lee Lewis), and a somewhat indescribable book about Dante, teaching himself Latin and medieval Italian along the way. Tosches …
October 31, 2019
Screening Room: ‘Harriet’
Although far from perfect, the new Harriet Tubman biopic is well worth seeing even just for Cynthia Erivo’s transcendent turn as the legendary “slave stealer” and Union spy. Harriet opens this week. My review is at PopMatters: It is hard to imagine a more perfect candidate for a heroic, against-all-odds biopic. But given the culture’s habitual blindness …
October 27, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Remember to Tell a Story
Since the Great Recession, more college students have been shifting their majors from English toward more supposedly employment-friendly study in the STEM fields like engineering, math, and computer science. But one advantage held by people who study literature and write (though they may not be so hot at calculating a tip on the fly) is …
