Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 70
October 25, 2019
Screening Room: ‘The Current War’
After a tumultuous production history that involved a fight with Harvey Weinstein, a badly mangled cut premiering at Toronto two years ago, and the director wresting his work back from Weinstein and releasing the version that he wanted, The Current War hits theaters today. It’s a curiously stylized drama about the electricity innovation battle between George …
October 21, 2019
Screening Room: ‘The Lighthouse’
The new movie from Robert Eggers (The Witch) strands two men (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) on a remote island and watches them unravel in a flurry of fantastical madhouse imagery. My review of The Lighthouse is at PopMatters: It feels fitting that Robert Eggers’ claustrophobic and sea-sprayed gothic masterpiece about two men losing their minds on …
October 20, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Write Like a Scientist
For the last couple decades, Cormac McCarthy has been something of a fiction writer in residence at the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific center whose attendees are more likely to be doing postdoc physics research than crafting lucid prose. Since clarity and concision matter as much as research in getting a point across, McCarthy has …
October 15, 2019
Screening Room: ‘On Broadway’
In Oren Jacoby’s new documentary On Broadway, a host of theater stars and other artists explain just what makes the Great White Way so wonderful. It’s a treat. On Broadway is making the rounds at film festivals now. My review is at PopMatters: On Broadway is generally at its best when delivering nuggets of theatrical lore, particularly those involving …
October 13, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Be the Bird
A lot of writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, involves research. Crime novelists go out on ride-alongs with cops and interview morticians to figure out the tricks of the trade to embed in their books so that the made-up feels more authentic. Most nonfiction writers, even if they have a specialty, have to write about things …
October 6, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Stop Selling
Tavi Gevinson, the onetime teen fashion maven and editor of Rookie and current New York ingenue, came to grips recently with all the time and energy she had been putting into crafting likable versions of herself for social media. It’s a common phenomenon in our era, the neurotic time-suckage of Instagram: There are plenty of well-documented …
October 4, 2019
Reader’s Corner: Going Back to Updike
In the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood does that thing some of us dread: Going back to the author we once loved—and everyone else told us to love—years later to see how they stand up. Reconsidering someone like John Updike, so of-the-moment in postwar American letters, she assumes will be a fraught matter: I …
October 3, 2019
Nota Bene: ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ in Japan
Fiddler on the Roof premiered on Broadway in 1964, proving that an nontraditional musical about an Eastern European shtetl family being wrenched apart by the struggle over tradition and fears of the next pogrom could play to massive audiences. It still does today. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of its first production in Japan. Since …
October 2, 2019
Screening Room: ‘Bacurau’
In the haunting new movie from the director of Aquarius and Neighboring Sounds, a remote Brazilian village fights off mysterious invaders. Bacurau had its U.S. premiere this week at the New York Film Festival. My review is at PopMatters. Here’s the trailer:
September 29, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Write Like the Ukraine Whistleblower
Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Writing Center at Harvard, has some surprising advice for where to find good writing: Follow the example of the government whistleblower who filed a complaint about how the *President has been degrading the office (most recently). According to Rosenzweig, this might be a government report, but it does what all …
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