Hacker Cinema
The Leopard
Il gattopardo
1963 · Film · 186 min
Directed by Luchino Visconti
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life.
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5 comments on Hacker News
http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2011/12/mm-movie-review-leopard.html
I've thought about similar problems like rewatching your favorite movie, and concluded that treating it as a priority queue or trying to watch it every _n_ days is the wrong approach; you want to instead be reminded when you've forgotten about your friend Alex or what _The Leopard_ is about, so you can then ping them & catch up or rewatch that movie with a near-fresh mind. (If you ping Alex while you remember them, then maybe there's another actually-forgotten friend you could've pinged instead who would be more valuable to get back in touch with.)
It is, in other words, the exact opposite of 'spaced repetition', where you want to review right before forgetting to strengthen the memory the most; in this use-case, 'anti-spaced repetition', you want to review only after you've forgotten it. (https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spaced-repetition-review-of-past-written-materials-for-serendipity-rediscovery-archive-revisiter)
Garibaldi's troops got a brief scene in "The Leopard". I'm sure that there's more than one Italian movie featuring Garibaldi.
I love old Best Sellers. Don't think that article was real helpful in listing any.
For example, pretty much everything by Michener is amazing, but nobody cares about him any more. He's dismissed as some kind of trashy or middlebrow post WW-2 writer; maybe he was -but he's also almost always a lot of fun to read, and occasionally incredibly interesting.
The Bjorndal Saga by Trygve Gulbranssen is largely forgotten in the US (maybe less so in Norway), but won all kinds of presidential awards and was a big deal in its day. It's sort of like "The Leopard" which is less forgotten, since they made a decent movie out of it (probably the great Italian novel). Greater novel though, in my opinion.
Another one I picked up because of an interview with Jim Simons; Jan de Hartog's "the Captain" -so far so good; was a big deal back in its day; it's predecessor "Captain Jan" was important enough it figured into Holland's war story. Totally forgotten now in the anglosphere anyway, and I'd have never heard of it if it weren't for a one off statement by an important guy who could hardly remember the name himself.
Dennis Wheatley is another huge best seller from the Ian Fleming era of trash novels; loads of fun to read -vastly better than Fleming. Alas, the movies they made of his books were all "video nasties" rather than James Bond.
None of these are Nobel Prize in Literature tier books, they vary wildly in quality, but they're loads of fun to read now as they were back then. Books don't always need to be an exercise in self improvement.
There are some corkers here. Wonderful to imagine Bowie reading The Leopard (I wonder if he enjoyed the masterful Visconti film of it, too).