Chris Barsanti

About Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti is a habitual scrivener on books and film for the lucky readers of PopMatters, as well as Film Journal International, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. A senior writer at Film Critic.com, he is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and New York Film Critics Online. If he has anything else left to say, it gets blogged at Vast Wasteland.

Features

Books

In Memoriam: Thomas M. Disch

[9.Jul.08] :. It's often said of uncommonly talented writers that they defied description; in Disch's case, that actually managed to be true.

Recent features

 
Featured Article

Books

Brave New World

[28.Nov.07] :. Naomi Klein convincingly argues in her crushingly pessimistic but magisterial work The Shock Doctrine that the future could well be a "cruel and ruthlessly divided" place where "money and race buy survival".

Recent features

 
Featured Article

Books

A Lost Cause: Tim Weiner's History of the C.I.A.

[24.Jul.07] :. Deep down, most of us probably know that the Central Intelligence Agency can't be nearly as cool as our popular media would have us believe.

Recent features

 

Columns

The Screener

Are We Not Funny? Laugh, Damn You!

[5.Sep.08] :. The problem with the (inexplicably popular) Tropic Thunder may be that Ben Stiller is just not a funny filmmaker. Not even remotely.

Recent columns

 

Reviews

Books

The Dark Side by Jane Mayer

[21.Aug.08] :. As Mayer recounts in her history of what followed 9/11, Cheney was ready for this scenario because he'd been "secretly practicing for doomsday."

Recent Book reviews

 
PopMatters Pick

DVDs

The Wire: The Complete Fifth Season

[15.Aug.08] :. The dense mythology, painstakingly created over five novelistic seasons, has enough drama packed inside to be easily spun out for the next five, ten, 15 years.

Recent DVD reviews

 

Books

More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss

[28.Jul.08] :. Strauss turns a sociological eye on his cast of characters and seems at times on the verge of creating a Bonfire of the Vanities for the new millennium.

Recent Book reviews

 

Comics

Willie & Joe: The WWII Years

[15.Jul.08] :. Mauldin was a chronicler of the everyday grime and misery that was the life of the average G.I., "These strange, mud-caked creatures who fight the war."

Recent Comic reviews

 

DVDs

The Thief of Bagdad - Criterion Collection

[27.Jun.08] :. Let's hope that one day such wonder at Baghdad will be possible, again.

Recent DVD reviews

 

DVDs   John Adams (HBO Miniseries)

DVDs   Square Pegs: The Complete Series

Books   The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 by Laura Furman (Editor)

Film   Sex and the City: The Movie

DVDs   Indiana Jones: The Adventure Collection

Books   The Complex by Nick Turse

DVDs   Bonnie and Clyde

PopMatters Pick

Books

Corporate Warriors by P. W. Singer

[25.Apr.08] :. By refusing to cast himself as a finger-wagging scold on the subject of military contractors, Singer’s concerns have all that much more power.

Recent Book reviews

 

Books   The Resurrectionist by Jack O'Connell

Books   The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret

Books   The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell

PopMatters Pick

Books

Our Daily Meds by Melody Petersen

[11.Mar.08] :. It's hard to read Our Daily Meds without thinking of Americans as shaven-head underground dwellers of THX-1138, shuffling through their twilight days in a prescription-drug-haze.

Recent Book reviews

 

Books   Against the Machine by Lee Siegel

Books   American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis

Books   Baltimore by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden

Books   The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

PopMatters Pick

DVDs

I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba)

[10.Dec.07] :. The high-flying poem of a plot, the daredevil cinematography that nearly dances, the pulse-quickening humanism: all mark I Am Cuba as a rare emblem of a more idealistic past.

Recent DVD reviews

 

Books   Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Books   The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

Books   Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II by The United States Army

Books   Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

Books   On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Books   The Yiddish Policemens Union by Michael Chabon

Books   God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Books   The Changing Face of War by Martin Van Creveld

Books   The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber

PopMatters Pick

Books

The Road by Cormac McCarthy / Oprah's Book Club selection

[28.Mar.07] :. Oprah loves the father-son journey of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel and has made it the newest pick in the influential Oprah's Book Club.

Recent Book reviews

 

Books   Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael B. Oren

Books   You Dont Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

Books   Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson

Books   Murder City by Michael Lesy

Books   The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin

Books   Alternadad by Neal Pollack

Books   Dangerous Nation by Robert Kagan

Books   State of Denial by Bob Woodward

Books   Conservatize Me by John Moe

Books   Liseys Story by Stephen King

Books   Homicide by David Simon

Books   The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Boullier, translated by Lorin Stein

Books   The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Featured Article

DVDs

Kicking and Screaming (2006)

[25.Aug.06] :. Behind all the banter and postgraduate trauma, Kicking and Screaming is a love story, only it's a fairly sour one that unfolds in reverse.

Recent DVD reviews

 

Books   The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind

Books   BOFFO! by Peter Bart

Featured Article

DVDs

Dazed and Confused: Criterion Collection (1993)

[20.Jul.06] :. Criterion's DVD appreciates the film itself, without trying too hard to analyze or understand it, thank god.

Recent DVD reviews

 
Featured Article

Film

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

[6.Jul.06] :. The suits make for images so fascinating they feel nearly "addictive," appropriate given that the film is about (among other things), viewing, reality, and addiction.

Recent Film reviews

 

Books   The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley

Film   Three Times (Zui hao de shi guang) (2006)

TV   The Henry Rollins Show

Blog posts

Re:Print

The Graphic Report: Summer Edition

[11.Aug.08] :. And so, on to looking at what's worth reading, graphic novel-speaking, before fall comes calling.

Re:Print

 

Re:Print

The Graphic Report: Bottomless Belly Button

[8.Jul.08] :. It looks bigger than it actually is, if that's physically possible. A 720-page tome that lands with an imposing, Tolstey-esque thud on any surface it might happen to be dropped upon, Dash Shaw's...

Re:Print

 

Short Ends and Leader

Consumer Apocalypse: WALL-E

[30.Jun.08] :. As part of a double dose of Disney Monday, Chris Barsanti looks at the recent release from CG savants Pixar.

Short Ends and Leader

 

Short Ends and Leader

Late Delivery: Take Out (2004)

[28.Jun.08] :. Filmed back in 2004 but for some reason only trickling out into indie release now, Take Out is a video verite snapshot of a day in the life of a hapless Chinese delivery man trying to come up...

Short Ends and Leader

 

Short Ends and Leader

HBO: The Movie

[29.May.08] :. Michael Patrick King takes about two or three season finales' worth of tears and OMG jawdroppers and whacks them together into a big, sloppy, gooey sundae of a film that is, for better or for worse, just like the show … only longer.

Short Ends and Leader

 

Short Ends and Leader   Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Re:Print   The Graphic Report: The Killing Joke

Re:Print   The Graphic Edition: Paul Goes Fishing

Re:Print   The Will Eisner Edition

Re:Print   Mexican Radio

Re:Print   The Graphic Edition

Consuming Consumables   The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein [$28.00]

Consuming Consumables   The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon [$26.95]

Consuming Consumables   On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan [$13.95]

Consuming Consumables   The Road by Cormac McCarthy [$14.95]

Re:Print   National Book Awards

Re:Print   Truth in Comics: After the Deluge

Re:Print   Bookmarks: The Book of Vices

Re:Print   We Are (Somewhat) Amused

Re:Print   Winning the Right War

Re:Print   The World Without Us

Re:Print   Getting Biblical

Re:Print   Soon-Forgotten Harry

Re:Print   Vampire Love Triangle

Re:Print   The next Potter?

 
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