Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 80
December 31, 2018
Department of Lists: 2018 Edition
Since it’s the end of the year, and there’s only so much champagne one can drink while watching Andy Cohen/Anderson Cooper and hoping that 2019 will show 2018 how things should have gone, it’s time to look back at some of the best that the year that was had to offer. To that end, I contributed …
December 30, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Work
In his novel Hollywood, a not-so-thinly-veiled account of working on the movie Barfly, Charles Bukowski wrote this: Writing was never work for me. It had been the same for as long as I could remember: turn on the radio to a classical music station, light a cigarette or cigar, open the bottle. The typer did …
December 29, 2018
Screening Room: Best Movies of 2018
Now that we’re almost to January, it’s time to take a look back at the year that was, movie-wise. My accounting of the best movies to hit screens, big and small, in 2018, was published at Eyes Wide Open: The more things changed at the movies in 2018, the more they stayed the same. The year’s …
December 23, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Pay Attention, Be Free
The best writers make it look easy. Not just that, they make it seem as though the words just flowed out of them. We know that that is not, can not, be true. Even the fastest writers are masters of control. Their speed is in part the result of careful planning and diligent editing as …
December 21, 2018
Screening Room: ‘Vice’
Yes, that’s Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in the latest dark comic take on modern American history from Adam McKay, who previously dissected the 2008 crash in The Big Short. Vice opens on Christmas Day. My review is at PopMatters: The Cheney presented in Vice is pretty close to the one we saw in those terrifying years after 9/11. …
December 19, 2018
Screening Room: ‘Mary Poppins Returns’
Going back to the well many decades later, Disney delivers a brand-new musical adaptation of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books that’s not close to the original but better than it has any right to be. Mary Poppins Returns opens wide today. My review is at PopMatters: As the law of diminishing returns for any sequel is …
December 16, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Bother Competing
By any definition of the term, Rachel Kushner is a successful writer. Each of her three books—Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, and The Mars Room—have been praised to the skies. At least one of them (The Flamethrowers) is arguably one of the great American novels of the last twenty years. Nevertheless, she doesn’t believe that …
December 15, 2018
Screening Room: ‘Bird Box’
The latest movie from Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) is a postapocalyptic horror story starring Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich. Bird Box is playing now on Netflix. My review is at Slant Magazine: Needing to avoid psychotic zombies isn’t the only danger faced by the harried survivors of an unspecified pandemic at the start of director Susanne …
December 14, 2018
Screening Room: ‘Roma’
Alfonso Cuaron’s latest movie, Roma, is playing now in limited release and on Netflix. If at all possible, see it on the big screen. My review is at PopMatters: You could argue that Alfonso Cuarón’s gorgeously imagined and intimate epic Roma invokes politics when convenient for dramatic impact but ignores their context in order to move forward with the …
December 9, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Love Your Characters and Other Rules
Etgar Keret, brilliant creator of collections like The Nimrod Flipout, is one of the greatest living practitioners of the dry, droll, and surreal black comic story. Interestingly, when he gave Rookie his 10 rules for writing, though, they were quite joyful and optimistic: Make sure you enjoy writing. Love your characters. When you’re writing, you don’t owe anything to …
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