We don’t usually watch reality shows but Tyler Cowen mentioned this in his blog and I was curious enough to give it a try. The series follows a businessman Marcus Lemonis as he meets with owners of various businesses which under some form of distress or another. He then makes an offer of money in exchange for a stake in the company or a share of the profits. The series appears to be very successful as it now has six seasons but watching just this first season is enough to satisfy my curiosity.
This is a boardgame that is old enough of be considered a venerable classic. It’s also known for being actually rather awful as my boardgame friend once warned me. It does have so many expansions that it must have its share of fans and I was curious enough to want to try it when it was included in a bundle of other such boardgame adaptations.
This would be the first film I’ve watched by director Masaharu Take and it’s pretty hard to decide what genre it belongs in. Its Wikipedia page describes it as a sports drama but while it has boxing, it’s not really about boxing. My wife suggests that it’s a love story but that’s not entirely right. In the end, I think that this is a film about people just don’t quite fit right in society and so this film too doesn’t feel like a perfect fit in any genre.
Like many other children I thought that The Pink Panther was a cartoon due to the popularity of its mascot and was left disappointed and confused when I saw that this was not the case. Much later I learned that there is an entire series of these films about the bumbling Jacques Clouseau but I still remembered my early irritation and never watched any of them. Since I’ve been working through all of the classics of cinema, it’s only fair to give what is considered one of the greatest comedies of all time a shot.
So I only just wrote that we’re probably done with the oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick and immediately upon watching this, I realized that we’ve never watched Barry Lyndon. This is a documentary about Leon Vitali, the man who would become Kubrick’s primary assistant. I originally thought that he must have been his cameraman or something but, no, he really was his assistant for about 25 years.
I held off reading this for the longest time because I didn’t like the first one all that much and I’d heard that the English translation, by Joel Martinsen this time instead of Ken Liu, was kind of weak. Still I kept running across references to it such as how even Barack Obama is a big fan and went to meet author Liu Cixin. I also realized that even in the English-speaking world, big idea science-fiction novels are rather rare and this is nothing if not all about big ideas.
I usually don’t write about television shows here but I think I might have to start doing so as they are becoming increasingly sophisticated and have more artistic merit than many films. The Expanse is a great example, being an impressively well produced adaptation of the novels James S.A. Corey. So far we’ve watched the first two seasons and while they are very far from being perfect, I found it surprising that something this good exists for television.
