Author: chrisbarsanti

A freelancer like those of yore, I write and edit for cold hard cash from the highest bidder in the land -- or just the occasional kind word. You can find links to my scrivenings at http://chrisbarsanti.net/.

Screening Room: ‘Backrooms’ is Horror Cinema’s ‘Lost’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

I wrote about the new horror hit Backrooms and a certain TV show whose promise and disappointments it resembles for PopMatters:

To  begin, aside from the required warning that spoilers follow, let us stipulate that what happened in movie theaters in the early summer of 2026 was a good thing for the art and the industry. While jumped-up Disney streaming series and feature-length stuffed toy ad The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau) strained to find an audience, filmgoers and industry-watchers were instead transfixed by a pair of new horror films from 20-something directors. Curry Barker’s haunted-girlfriend screamer, Obsession, looks to be the launchpad for an inventive genre director with plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Although Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is one of the freshest bits of guerrilla weirdness to have taken over the multiplex in a long time, the film’s looseness and sprawl may suggest a relatively shallow fictional universe that undercuts its groundbreaking potential…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Tuner’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

I reviewed Tuner for Slant Magazine:

For his first narrative after a run of smart, propulsive documentaries, among them 2022’s Oscar-winning Navalny, Daniel Roher delivers a propulsive modern noir that might not be especially smart but has an appealing cleverness and lightness of touch. Written by Roher and Robert Ramsey, Tuner’s hook is in its high-concept story design, which is centered on Nikki (Leo Woodall), a New York piano tuner whose boss, Harry (Dustin Hoffman), is also his best friend, surrogate father figure, and unwitting reason for Nikki’s turn to crime…

It opens this weekend. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘In the Grey’

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I reviewed In the Grey for Slant Magazine:

The Guy Ritchie content conveyor belt continues to turn with In the Grey, another largely disposable actioner that starts off as a breezy romp and ends up an overly dense spider’s web of almost arbitrary plot choices punctuated by automatic weapons fire. The comedically dense plot isn’t a problem until Ritchie, who wrote the script, tries to tie it all together into something that makes a bit of sense. He comes close but doesn’t quite deliver, having tossed too many balls in the air to have a remote chance of catching all of them…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Sell Your Story on eBay

On By chrisbarsantiIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

For all those currently bereft of inspiration, here’s a reason to pick up your pen again. The Advanced Fiction Workshop at the University of Arizona is trying out an experiment they’re calling Significant Objects:

Writers purchase an essentially valueless object (less than $5, typically secondhand), write a story or essay or poem about it, and we will auction the object and the writing off on ebay…

Any profits go to a local cat shelter. So win win.

Writer’s Desk: Focus on the First Line

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A bored reader has lots of other things to do. Hook them right away. Do not waste your time, because if you do they will feel you are wasting theirs.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer kicks off with one of the greats:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That has nothing to do with the plot. He is just describing the sky. But the invocation of omnipresent, flickering, slightly decayed and malevolent yet mundane technology establishes everything you need to know about the story that follows.

Gibson himself said:

The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text…

It’s a challenge. You might have the whole piece done but still feel dissatisfied with the opener. Spend the time to get it right.

(h/t Joe Fassler)

TV Room: ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ is a Very Silly DVD

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film, Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

My review of the new Criterion 4K edition of Monty Python’s Life of Brian ran at PopMatters:

Fittingly, Life of Brian was conceived on a pub crawl. The standard origin story, as told in one of the documentaries on Criterion’s packed special features disc, is that while they were boozing around Amsterdam during the press tour for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Eric Idle had an idea for a project called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. It stirs the imagination to think of the possibilities that title conjures: a send-up of muscly epics ala Mel Gibson; a glitzy musical packed with song-and-dance numbers; or a down-and-dirty melodrama about an ambitious, slightly schizoid kid from Galilee with a dream…

Speaking of which, the Monty Python FAQ is still available at all your finer book outlets.

Screening Room: ‘Power Ballad’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment
(Lionsgate)

I reviewed Power Ballad at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival for Slant Magazine:

John Carney’s Power Ballad has most of what it needs to succeed, from a charming pair of leads to a fittingly catchy song. But like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, Rick (Paul Rudd) and Danny (Nick Jonas), the film never finds the right groove…

It opens June 5. Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: Stephen King’s Real Nightmares

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

I reviewed Caroline Bicks’ new book on Stephen King for PopMatters:

An academic by training, Bicks specializes in Shakespeare and has several works on the Bard to her name, e.g., Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World (2021). As such, she frames Monsters in the Archives as a literary researcher ready to leverage her training in deep text analysis. Yet her book also has a personal component, given her attachment to King’s work from an early age. You know what she means: that quivery, excited, frightening feeling that comes from reading stories like ‘The Boogeyman’ too young…

Writer’s Desk: Hard is Not Impossible

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

One thing writers always want more of is time. We often think that if we only had long stretches of uninterrupted, unencumbered hours stretching out before us like a rapture-worthy landscape, then all of our work could get done. There is some truth to this. It’s hard to knock out a novel while working fourteen-hour days.

But hard is not impossible. Also, as Maggie O’Farrell says, obstacles can actually help:

There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work. You need to reach the keyboard in a state of hunger, of desperation. You need to sit down at your desk with a desire to unleash all that you have been mulling over, all those solutions and permutations and reframings…

Interruptions are the devil and can break up your flow. But interruptions are also life, which you cannot put on hold just to get more pages done.

Screening Room: ‘Project Hail Mary’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment
(Amazon MGM Studios)

I reviewed Project Hail Mary, Amazon’s new film about Ryan Gosling saving the planet, for PopMatters:

Some may walk out of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s goofy and pop-operatic adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary trying to string together all the shards of hard science fiction-speak that just burst from the screen at them. They may be able to math all the astrophysics which the film’s scientist hero, Ryland (Ryan Gosling), has to wrangle to save Earth from microscopic alien organisms that are rapidly eating the Sun. While that would be an admirable accomplishment—Drew Goddard’s script does not stint on the science—it would also be beside the point…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Fantasy Life’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New1 Comment

I reviewed Fantasy Life for Slant Magazine:

Writer-director Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is an initially familiar-feeling rom-com about urbane yet nerve-rattled characters that eventually, but just barely, transcends expectations. A law school dropout who appears constantly shell-shocked by the concussions of everyday life, Sam (Shear) is first seen getting fired from his impossibly bleak office job before having a panic attack at a bookstore. With seemingly few prospects, he takes on a job as a manny for the children of a wealthy couple, Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola). Sam almost immediately falls headlong for Dianne, an ex-actor suffering from different but similarly debilitating and career-stifling mental health issues…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nova ’78’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Festivals, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

One of the must-see documentaries at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival was Nova ’78.

My review ran in The Playlist:

Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them…

Writer’s Desk: Keep Them Coming Back

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

The late Martin Amis had a simple and attractive philosophy of reading:

I’m very committed to the pleasure principle. You read literature to have a good time. Or why else would people go on doing it?

It’s very easy to get caught up in what you want to say, how to say it, and your larger themes. But no matter how dire the subject or serious the intent, writing can still give pleasure.