Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 83
October 16, 2018
Screening Room: 2018 Twin Cities Film Festival
The 11-day Twin Cities Film Festival opens tomorrow, with over 120 features and shorts, including some high-profile award contenders and some cool documentaries, hitting theaters later this year. My preview ran at City Pages.
October 15, 2018
Screening Room: Flinty, Funny ‘Private Life’ Shouldn’t Get Lost On Netflix
The newest family comedy from Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills, The Savages) follows a literary New York couple in the middle of a years-long saga to get pregnant. The results are often funny, but not pretty. Private Life opened at the New York Film Festival and is now on Netflix and in some theaters. My …
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October 14, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Imagine Your Reader
Novelist and poet Russell Banks (Family Life, Continental Drift, Affliction) had some advice for high school students in upstate New York a few years back: Imagine the teller but also imagine the listener. What is fiction after all but a sort of visual hallucination — you’re asking the reader to see things that aren’t there. When you’re …
October 7, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Start with the Sun
James Dickey won a National Book Award for his poetry collection Buckdancer’s Choice. That was years before he hit the big time with Deliverance. To some degree, poetry remained his first and last love. Later, in the 1985 collection How to Use the Power of the Printed Word, he offered some advice for aspiring, or even veteran …
October 5, 2018
Screening Room: A Little ‘Venom’ Goes a Long Way
A hybrid superhero-antihero misfire that wastes Tom Hardy in a should-have-been great role, Venom is somehow even less fun than when he played both Kray twins a few years back in the London gangster epic bomb Legend. Venom is playing now pretty much everywhere. My review is at Film Journal International: There are plenty of characters from the Spider-Man universe …
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October 4, 2018
Reader’s Corner: ‘Lake Success’ is a Picaresque Journey to Nowhere
My review of the new Gary Shteyngart novel is at PopMatters: One gets the sense from the start of Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success that this is going to be something of a status report on the nation. And it’s not just because of Trump. Barry Cohen, the doofus we’re stuck with throughout, stumbles into Port Authority bleeding from his …
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October 1, 2018
Screening Room: ‘Hold the Dark’
In Jeremy Saulnier’s bleak and bloody adaptation of William Giraldi’s bleak and bloody novel, a naturalist investigates the apparent killing of children by wolves in Alaska, only to encounter some far more dangerous creatures. Hold the Dark is playing now in limited release and on Netflix. My review is at Film Journal International: Jeffrey Wright never …
September 30, 2018
Writer’s Desk: Take Every Assignment
When Vivian Gornick wanted a job at the Village Voice in the late 1960s, she wrote an article and sent it to them. Editor Dan Wolf then called her up and asked, “Who the hell are you?” She replied, “I don’t know, you tell me.” She got anxious, sent him another article every year or so, and …
September 29, 2018
Screening Room: ‘The Virgin Spring’
My review of the Criterion Blu-ray edition of The Virgin Spring is at PopMatters: You can easily imagine the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s devastating The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1961) calling where they live “God’s country”. Their farm is situated in a kind of pristine wonderland of thick pine forests and gurgling streams. Religion plays a central role in most …
September 24, 2018
Screening Room: ‘A Matter of Life and Death’
There’s a new Criterion Blu-ray edition out with a gorgeous presentation of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1946 wartime afterlife romance A Matter of Life and Death. And yes, it’s pretty much required viewing. My review is at PopMatters: After making a run of cheery but subversive movies during World War II, always under the watchful eye of …
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