New in Theaters: ‘Jimi All Is By My Side’

On September 25, 2014September 25, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

Andre Benjamin in 'Jimi All Is By My Side' (Darko Entertainment) — Andre Benjamin in ‘Jimi All Is By My Side’ (Darko Entertainment)

Outkast’s Andre Benjamin as Jimi Hendrix in a film written and directed by John Ridley (Twelve Years a Slave)? Yes, please. No rights to any original Hendrix songs? Hmmm…

Jimi All Is By My Side is opening Friday in limited release and probably won’t hang around too long. My review is at Film Journal International:

Eventually somebody will make a sprawling, all-inclusive Jimi Hendrix movie with the estate’s full cooperation. The cinematography will be lush, the highs glorious and the lows despairing, past and present will bleed together, and the artist will emerge as a troubled but epochal figure who blazed brightly before burning out. Stars will litter the screen and the Dolby-assisted tidal wave of tunes will bring tears to every baby boomer in the house. That movie will almost definitely be better than the scattered and unsatisfying Jimi: All Is by My Side. But it won’t be as honest an attempt to get at the mystery of the man…

You can see the trailer here:

Reader’s Corner: Run this Bookstore

On September 21, 2014September 19, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

Wigtown (Shaun Bythell) — Wigtown, book town (Shaun Bythell)

Hey, wanna run a bookstore? If you can get yourself over to Wigtown in beautiful, not-independent Scotland, they’re giving away the chance to learn all the ins and outs of the trade. According to The Bookseller:

The Open Book project will invite interested parties to apply to live in and run a local bookshop, renamed The Open Book, for a period of up to six weeks. Anyone is invited to apply, with preference given to artists, writers, thinkers, and “bibliophiles”. Participants will be given a crash course in bookselling and will be asked to contribute to a blog outlining their experiences, as well as keeping the shop open for a set number of hours a week.

Check it out. Wigtown (it’s Scotland’s National Book Town, don’t you know) is on the western shore, looks remote and positively gorgeous. You’ll get a lot of reading done and perhaps learn why booksellers are both frequently grumpy and at the same time highly content with their lives.

Department of Weekend Reading: September 19, 2014

On September 19, 2014September 18, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Yes, most of the Nigerian girls Boko Haram kidnapped are still missing.
It’s possible that Mittens was right about Russia.
Jimi Hendrix died this week in 1970, he was 27 years old. In memoriam, read his 1969 interview with Rolling Stone, then watch “Voodoo Child.”
NASA just found a massive black hole (it has the mass of 21 million suns) inside one of the densest galaxies ever seen.
How the day of Scotland’s independence vote looked in newspapers.
One way to boost the economy: Legalize same-sex marriage.
If this doesn’t work, then yes, troops on the ground in the Middle East (again).
The Benghazi hearing where something useful might actually be accomplished.
Print and read: How Ebola jumped from a fruit bat to a child and then fooled everybody into thinking it was cholera.

New on DVD: ‘The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden’

On September 18, 2014September 18, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - FilmLeave a comment

Dore Strauch and Friedrich Ritter in their Galapagos garden, c. 1932 (Zeitgeist Films)

A Nietszche-loving disgruntled German doctor and his worshipful, sickly wife; a “Baroness” who believes no man can resist her; an isolated island; weaponry and jealousy. How could anything go wrong? The story of how it really, really did is the subject of The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, one of the year’s curiouser documentaries.

The Galapagos Affair is on DVD and Blu-ray now. My review is at PopMatters:

In 1929, a certain kind of European man apparently thought nothing of packing up and moving himself and his family to a remote cluster of islands far off the coast of Ecuador … The first couple to arrive on the tiny and uninhabited island of Floreana was Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch. From his and Dore’s writings, it’s clear that Friedrich was a walking stereotype of the clueless Germanic intellectual, so slavishly devoted to his beloved Nietzsche that reality didn’t stand a chance. A successful doctor who believed society to be “a huge impersonal monster,” Friedrich moved them to Floreana in order to “make an Eden.” That they were both married at the time to other people and didn’t know much of anything about surviving in the wild wasn’t deemed an obstacle…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: Nick Cave is Still Alive in ‘20,000 Days on Earth’

On September 15, 2014September 15, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Nick Cave drives to parts unknown with Kylie Minogue in '20,000 Days on Earth' (Drafthouse Films) — Nick Cave drives to parts unknown with Kylie Minogue in ‘20,000 Days on Earth’ (Drafthouse Films)

20,000 Days on Earth is a meta-fictional documentary about Nick Cave, art, life, death, and above all writing. It’s beautiful and transfixing and is opening in limited release this Wednesday.

My review is at Film Journal International:

The last thing that audiences need is another documentary about the greatness of another band or artist of the past. It’s all too easy once artists have their glory days behind them to lock all that rough chaos up into a neatly packaged movie, maybe a box set filled with B-sides and rarities. That doesn’t mean that the likes of Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, Finding Fela and A Band Called Death aren’t worthy films. But today’s documentary audiences could be forgiven for thinking that to be a music fan today is akin to being an archivist. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s new documentary about Australian Goth-poet Nick Cave is a long overdue reversal of that nostalgic trend…

You can see the trailer here:

Writer’s Corner: Getting Prompted

On September 14, 2014September 11, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn WritingLeave a comment

UnderwoodKeyboard

Having a hard time getting started on that blank page? Every writer has their tried-and-true cures for the block—taking a walk, playing with the cat, etc. But even those will eventually run up against the dread lack of inspiration.

In those scenarios, prompts are the kind of thing that never hurt. Writer’s Digest has a handy repository of them here, ranging from things like mysterious monsters on a ship to zombie-killing and a pun competition.

Anything to get the juices flowing.

Reader’s Corner: The Books Facebook Users Love

On September 13, 2014September 11, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

Does this list say something about who’s using Facebook? In yet another of the listicles that they’re famous for, BuzzFeed shows the Top 20 books most beloved by Facebook users. With the exception of the number one pick (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone?), it’s pretty much what you would expect:

Great Modern Novels I Had To Read In School But Actually Liked (1984, The Great Gatsby)
Books That I Read 50 Million Times As A Child And Whisked Me Away Somewhere Magical Each Time (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Anne of Green Gables, A Wrinkle in Time, The Lord of the Rings)
Actual Classics That Tend Not To Be Assigned In School Anymore (Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice)
Self-Help Creed Masked As Literature (The Alchemist)
The Only Book I Read In The Past Few Years (The Hunger Games)
Outlier (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Bible)

When you dig into the full dataset that Facebook made available, particularly the full Top 100 list, a few more surprises pop up. There’s a heavier sprinkling of modern YA, plus the occasional religious text (The Book of Mormon). But what’s fascinating is just how overwhelmingly genre the list is, compared to what it might have been a few years ago. Even though many mainstream readers barely know who they are, Terry Pratchett, Orson Scott Card, Alan Moore, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Jordan all make appearances here.

This begs the question: Are Facebook users geekier than the population at large, or as the percentage of adults who actually read books falls every year, are genre fans just the ones more likely to keep reading books as opposed to tweets?

Also: is it a problem that the number-one book is Harry Potter? After all, according to Scientific American, children who were read to from those books acted more compassionately afterwards.

Department of Weekend Reading: September 12, 2014

On September 12, 2014September 11, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

It’s not just Ferguson that needs investigating, it’s the whole county.
2013’s worst Cardinals fan tweets.
What happens after robots have taken everybody’s jobs? Also: how then will people get paid? And: Robot restaurants, coming soon to a strip mall near you.
Literate millennials: More people under 30 years old read a book in the last 12 months then their elders.
Could TMZ win a Pulitzer for the Ray Rice video?
Junk food is better for the environment than healthy food … sort of.
Thirty years later: Miller’s Crossing.
Print and read: The angry moms who could take down the NRA.

New in Theaters: ‘The Green Prince’

On September 11, 2014September 11, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-Documentary, TelevisionLeave a comment

The art of espionage in 'The Green Prince' (Music Box Films) — The art of espionage in ‘The Green Prince’ (Music Box Films)

Wars aren’t fought just by armies and weapons. They also need intelligence, which requires spies, who often need to betray everyone around them. It’s a tricky business.

The Green Prince, about a Palestinian who risked his life to spy for Israel, opens tomorrow in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

Restrained, clinical, and yet full-hearted, The Green Prince is one of the year’s, and maybe ultimately the decade’s, great spy stories. A two-hander about betrayal, shame, honor, and murky motivations, it includes nothing more than two men — one an Israeli intelligence operative and the other his Palestinian source — telling their part of a sprawling and many years’ long operation to undermine Hamas. Director Nadav Schirman stitches together their crisp, well-honed interview segments with a textured mosaic of surveillance footage and the fortunately occasional live-action reenactment into a nearly seamless whole. The result both outdoes the invented drama of many a spy thriller and raises more ethical quandaries than can be easily dispensed with…

You can see the trailer here:

Screening Room: The Top 5 Sci-Fi Movies That Never Were

On September 10, 2014September 9, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

Production art from Alejandro Jodorowsky's never-produced 'Dune' (Sony Pictures Classics) — Production art from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-produced ‘Dune’ (Sony Pictures Classics)

Sometimes it can be better to think about the possibilities of those great unrealized what-if film projects of legend than to actually see them made. Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s I Am Legend, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs spinoff; there’s a lot of possibilities there for genius, but also insane overreach.

In the interest of indulging the what if side of things, I posted a highly subjective list at Short Ends & Leader of the “Top 5 Sci-Fi Movies That Never Were“:

Even were it not for the mental anguish brought about by the revival of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it would be obvious we live in strange times, cinematically speaking. To wit: Every other movie playing in theaters features alien invasions, bionic bodysuit weaponry, time travel, or a half-dozen other elements that make a geeky kid’s heart beat just that much faster. You would think, then, that studios would be dusting off every science-fiction script their D-girls passed on over the past couple decades and working out how to put Matthew McConaughey in it…

New in Theaters: ‘Take Me to the River’

On September 9, 2014September 9, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Even Snoop Dog is in 'Take Me to the River' (Social Capital Films, LLC) — Even Snoop Dog is in ‘Take Me to the River’ (Social Capital Films, LLC)

Memphis’s deeply knotted influence on American music gets a timely celebration in the new documentary Take Me to the River, opening this Friday in limited release and then later around the country.

My review is at Film Journal International:

There’s no end of love flowing off the screen in Martin Shore’s thrilled-to-be-here celebration of the Memphis Sound. That should be no surprise, given the legends that longtime producer and (clearly) first-time director Shore assembled for a promising marriage of old and new schools of music. The list of onscreen talent is deep, from Mavis Staples and Charlie Musselwhite to rapper Al Kapone and a bench of murderously talented session men. The organizing principle is that by joining different traditions and generations in the recording studio, the film can divine the source of that alchemical magic Memphis music has produced over the years. It also wants to serve as a monument to these heroes, a few of whom passed away before the film was finished…

You can see the trailer here:

Writer’s Corner: Staying Out of the Rain

On September 7, 2014September 4, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn WritingLeave a comment

Crowd at a Harvard-Princeton football game, Nov. 8, 1913. (Library of Congress)

There are plenty of good reasons to become a writer—excepting of course a desire for money, fame, or respectability.

In “Phi Beta Football,” a football-season essay for the New Yorker about his childhood watching Princeton football games, John McPhee identifies another superb reason to devote one’s life to the written word:

…on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadium sidelines. The rain stung my eyes, and I was shivering. Looking up at the press box, where I knew there were space heaters, I saw those people sitting dry under a roof, and decided then and there to become a writer.

Department of Weekend Reading: September 5, 2014

On September 5, 2014September 5, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Preserving the Ferguson QuikTrip.
Religion as license for discrimination: More Catholic-school faculty fired for being gay.
The last living passenger pigeon’s name was Martha, and she died in the Cincinnati Zoo 100 years ago.
The modern school: What’s a book, anyway?
Yes, looking at those stolen celebrity pictures makes you part of the problem; also this.
On TV, mental illness equals being totally awesome.
Calling all D&Ders: The fifth edition of the Player’s Handbook is out.
Germaine Greer: Fine author, but poor student of publishing.
Thomas Pynchon’s edits to his dialogue on The Simpsons.
Print and read: Mauritania still has over 100,000 slaves.

New in Theaters: ‘Last Days in Vietnam’ Revisits the End of a Mistake

On September 4, 2014September 4, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

South Vietnamese try to get on one of the last American choppers out of Saigon, 1975 (American Experience Films / Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)

No wars end gracefully; some end more tragically than others. That truism is elegantly dramatized in the wrenching documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which opens tomorrow in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

The stark simplicity of Rory Kennedy’s masterful and Oscar-worthy Last Days in Vietnam stands in contrast to the drama of this complex and little discussed historical moment. When modern wars end, they are normally summed up in terms of strategies and battles, of winners and losers, how they impacted the great game of geopolitical gamesmanship. Except in the cases of spectacular events like the firebombing of Axis cities during World War II, the fates of civilians are rarely discussed. The Vietnam War isn’t much different. One of the factors that makes Kennedy’s film stand out is how it refuses to look away from one “burning question” about the end of the war: “Who goes … and who gets left behind?”…

You can see the trailer here:

New in Theaters: A Stroll Through ‘Memphis’

On September 4, 2014September 3, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Willis Earl Beal in 'Memphis' (Kino Lorber) — Willis Earl Beal in ‘Memphis’ (Kino Lorber)

Musician Willis Earl Beal ambles and agitates through Memphis in this half-film and half-art performance piece that feels like something Jim Jarmusch might have done if he’d never left town after shooting Mystery Train.

Memphis is opening Friday in extremely limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Beal is a musician with a cranky disposition and wild talent—that much we can divine. The film is at first a chronicle of his procrastination. He appears to owe an album to somebody but can’t find inspiration. Fighting off boredom and anomie, Beal walks and drives the tree-shaded streets of Memphis. He lives for a time in a large, beautiful home where the only furniture is a mattress and a never-installed, stubbornly symbolic chandelier. Later on, he starts falling through the cracks, moving into a one-legged friend’s cheap rooms and then into the woods, where he ruminates and burns things like an outsider artist stewing over his inner demons…

You can see the trailer here: