A Sucker for a Pretty Business Journalist

Hat tip to Sivaram for alerting me to Michael Lewis's review of Alice Schroeder's Buffett biography in the New Republic¹, "Master of Money". Lewis notes in the beginning of his review that,

Buffett has a long and happy history of admitting attractive, intelligent women into his life, which Schroeder describes without mentioning how neatly she fits into the pattern.

How she fits in the pattern, apparently, is that unlike other female business journalists -- e.g., CNBC's Becky Quick, and Liz Claman (now at Fox Business) who preceded her as the network's Buffett correspondent, Schroeder was intent on using her access to paint a warts-and-all portrait of Buffett as a person as well as as an investor. That leads to some interesting material, which is surveyed in Lewis's review. It's an entertaining read, as Lewis's essays usually are.

The photo above, of Warren Buffett and Alice Schroeder, comes from Khotanharmon.com.

¹Now that Condé Nast has pulled the plug on Portfolio, perhaps TNR will be a regular home for Michael Lewis's essays.

"Dark City"

In the comment thread of a previous post about Darren Aranofsky's film "The Fountain" ("Nigel Andrews on Darren Aranofsky"), we referred to another ambitious film with sci-fi elements that got mixed reviews, but was considered a masterpiece by at least one reviewer, Alex Proyas's 1998 film "Dark City". Below is the first paragraph of Roger Ebert's review of it (commenter Sivaram should be forewarned that Ebert mentions "2001: A Space Odyssey" in comparison):

``Dark City'' by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like ``Metropolis'' and ``2001: A Space Odyssey.'' If it is true, as the German director Werner Herzog believes, that we live in an age starved of new images, then ``Dark City'' is a film to nourish us. Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination.

As I noted to commenter J.K. in the Aranofsky comment thread, there were a few differences between the director's cut DVD of "Dark City" and the theatrical version. One of them was that, in the director's cut, Jennifer Connelly actually sang, instead of lip-syncing as she did in the theatrical version. The clip below, from the director's cut, features her singing "Sway".