Curving billiards shot / TUE 11-23-21 / Agricultural giant founded in Hawaii in 1851 / Rapper fronting the heavy metal band Body Count

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Can't think of a theme type that's less For Me. PERSONAL FINANCE is a term I recognize, but it's very general in my mind. I don't know the term "PERSONAL FINANCE investment," but the clue says PERSONAL FINANCE an investment *type*, so I assume that's a legit phrase. I also don't see how BONDS, SILVER, and CASH make a sufficiently tight grouping at all. Cash? I admit to being totally out of my depth when it comes to financial instruments and things people invest in (beyond your ordinary everyday IRAs, stocks & bonds, mutual funds, etc.). People invest in ... Cash? I believe you, but I just ... *have* ... cash. Hidden in a lunch box, in case we have to run. Is this ... "investing"? Cosplay? Who knows. Anyway, I think of Cash as uninvested, actually, but maybe you are investing in the "Cash" of other countries? Sigh. You can see how much I care. Look, the revealer is completely unsnappy and the theme set is arbitrary. Also, I will be stunned if the "personal" aspect of the theme doesn't elude a good chunk of solvers. I feel like I only dopily stumbled into it when I had to write all the theme answers out. People's names are used as theme answers All The Time, so it's Bizarre that you expect the "personal" nameness of today's three answers to resonate clearly at all. Truly weird. And of course the "persons" involved are all dudes. It's the financial world, I expect patriarchy. At least the puzzle's not about B!tcoin.

The one good thing about the puzzle is the grid shape, which is bizarre in a good way. Those three long Downs all in a row seemed pretty harrowing for a Tuesday, and one of them is a proper noun, and a themer, that a bunch of solvers aren't going to know ... and yet the short crosses were all very easy, and so I can't see people getting hung up there too long, if at all. LAST IN LINE was a little hard to parse, but again, crosses make things clear (that's their job!). If this puzzle does nothing else, it gives me the opportunity to recommend that you see the movie "TRANSIT" immediately, if not sooner (d. Christian Petzold, 2018) (5D: Kind of visa for just passing through an airport). Watched it with my Monday night Movie Club last month, and it's one of the most beautiful, haunting, mysterious movies I've seen in a long time. A really thoughtful meditation on refugees, the problem of belonging, and the concept of Home. Now that I've done that ... not much more to say about this grid. The fill is weak in the short stuff, but not so weak that it made me wince. Those tiny, cut-off, isolated corners in the SW and SE are aesthetically displeasing, but they're only 4x4 and filling them is just a perfunctory exercise, so again, the harm done is minimal. I do object to the spelling of CZAR here (51A: Nicholas I or II). We all have a TACIT (!) agreement that the Russian ruler is spelled TSAR, whereas a governmental policy director is spelled CZAR ("Drug CZAR"). Otherwise, it's just arbitrary nonsense, spell it this way, spell it that way, cats are marrying dogs and pigs are flying etc. Boundaries are good for us. Please respect the TSAR / CZAR distinction. Thank you.