Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Matthew Ball: 'Star Wars' Fatigue Is a Myth (but Disney’s Mistakes Were Real, Costly and Avoidable): "What we’re seeing is what I’d term 'accrued disappointment', a trend obfuscated by unprecedented short-term success but that almost always surfaces later down the line.... After only two films had been released, four of the directors originally announced for the first six films had been fired or replaced. Two of the firings happened so late into filming that upwards of 80% of the two films had to be reshot, to the tune of more than 100MM each. Until Solo, this chaos didn’t seem to affect the franchise’s box office.... In The Force Awakens... J.J. Abrams set up three major antagonists: Supreme Leader Snoke, Captain Phasma and The Knights of Ren. However, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (Episode VIII) quickly killed the first two and ignored the third.... With Abrams returning to close out the trilogy, more whipsaw seems likely...

Walter Jon Williams: Reviews Too Late: Money Heist http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2019/10/reviews-too-late-money-heist/: 'While recovering from surgery I binged, mainly continuing my exploration of Spanish TV with Money Heist (Casa de Papel, “House of Paper”)  I do like an intricate caper, as my Maijstral books demonstrate, and this is probably the longest caper ever filmed, something like sixteen hours of television originally split into two seasons.  (One crime over two seasons!)  The series was one of the most-watched in Europe last summer, which attracted the interest of Netflix.  When Netflix acquired the series it was re-edited into 22 episodes, and two more seasons were filmed.  (I’m halfway through Season Three, and Season Four has yet to be released.) So, whatta we got here?  Master criminal El Professor (Álvaro Morte) recruits a group of criminal specialists to take over the Spanish mint, run off a couple billion euros over a week’s time, and cleverly vanish along with the cash.  To preserve anonymity, each of the team adopts the pseudonym of a city, and the tale is narrated by Tokyo, a young woman with a history of robbing banks, and who recently watched her boyfriend gunned down when a heist she planned went terribly wrong.  Tokyo isn’t an unreliable narrator, exactly, but she’s an unreliable human being, prone to making an impulsive grand gesture at exactly the wrong moment. And in fact El Professor turns out to have made quite a number of mistakes in casting his crime...

Note to Self: I am voting for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse #spiderverse

For the Weekend: Rocky Training Montage: