Random Thoughts

January 1942: The Man Who Came To Dinner

The Man Who Came To Dinner. William Keighley. 1942.

Oh this isn’t Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner… I did think that was a much later movie… and it is!

Well, you can’t but enjoy Monty Woolley’s over-the-top performance, and Bette Davis is here, so it’s definitely got things going for it. It’s funny! It’s good, bitter fun. I was thinking at the start “er, surely it’s not going to turn out that Davis, the long-suffering secretary, is in love with that old codger?” but they go another way entirely.

Which is wonderful.

Lots of intrigue and silliness: A classic stage farce, with an incessant stream of people running in and out the doors (and up and down the stairs) to the one central room where most of the story takes place.

It’s funny and it tick tocks like a brilliant clockwork thing, but I find myself left somewhat cold throughout the middle part. And I think Lorraine is treated shabbily…

Oh! This is the film that Morrissey crabbed the lyrics for the Cemetary Gates song? “All those people, all those lives. Where are they now? Here was a woman, like myself, a woman who once lived and loved, full of they same passions, fears, jealousies, hates. And what remains of it now? Just this. Nothing more. […] I want to cry.”

Popular movies in January 1942 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
5283	7.6	The Man Who Came to Dinner
1056	7.1	Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake
582	6.9	Joan of Paris
290	6.9	Nazi Agent
272	6.9	The Fleet’s In
562	6.5	A Date with the Falcon
292	6.1	Lady for a Night

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

Editing WordPress Articles in Emacs

I’ve got my blog on WordPress.com, which has some positive aspects (I don’t have to run it) and some negative (I can’t control it fully). But whether I’m running WordPress myself or not, there’s one thing that’s always true: I loathe the browser-based editor.

When composing blog articles, I’ve been using the post-by-mail interface that WordPress.com offers, and it works OK. It’s got severe limitations in what it accepts, though: No <div>s or anything more fancy than a link and an image, really, and even those can’t be combined.

But editing is the main problem: I’ve tried using the Edit with Emacs Firefox plugin, and it doesn’t work with WordPress.com, apparently. So I’ve just… not… edited much, because it’s such a pain in the ass. The “visual” editor doesn’t even have reliable scrolling.

So yesterday evening I pulled myself together and started googling “emacs wordpress”, and found org2blog, which allows you to edit your WordPress blog posts using org mode. So it’s possible!

It turns out that this all is so much easier than I had imagined: WordPress has an old xmlrpc interface that you can just call with your credentials to do all this stuff. (It also has a new interface that’s oauth2-based, i.e., it requires a web browser in the auth flow with is just ick.)

The org2blog people have kindly separated out the low-level stuff into its own library, and I wrote a new library, ewp on top of that. Because even if Org is nice and stuff, I just want to edit my WordPress articles. I want WordPress to have the articles, and don’t want to have a “shadow” set of master texts.

With the help of that library (after fixing a multi/unibyte bug in the xml-rpl.el library (that was merged fast by the nice maintainer)), I finished off the library yesterday, and it’s basic, but does what I need, I think.

It lists the posts on WordPress, allows me to edit them, and to create new posts. (And, of course, since I’m very picture-happy, I also added some stuff to upload embedded media (which was a problem with the post-by-mail interface, because WordPress’ SMTP servers had a size limit of 100MB per email which they refused to increase, even after I asked them (so unreasonable!!!ONE!)).)

Here’s a Youtube demo of me typing away at my very shiny sofa laptop:

This has all been tested very, very lightly, of course, so I’d caution er caution. I’ve tried posting and editing myself on my WordPress.com blog, but who knows what happens on other WordPress installations…

And I’m sure it’ll grow more features as time passes. Things tend that way, don’t they?

December 1941: Sullivan’s Travels

Sullivan’s Travels. Preston Sturges. 1941.

After a string of low-budget movies today, here’s an A feature. By Preston Sturges! This is his third movie in this blog series! I didn’t plan this! It starts off with people fighting on the top of a speeding train! That’s the best way to start a film!

It’s a movie about making movies, and they condescendingly refer to Hopalong Cassidy movies (which was, like, the previous entry in this blog series).

This is absolutely hilarious. I was literally rolling around on the floor laughing.

(By literally I mean figuratively, of course.)

It’s brilliant. The mix of cynicism and sentimentality is perfect. It’s definitely not a Frank Capra film. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Wonderful performances and razor-sharp dialogue.

Popular movies in December 1941 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
18951	8.1	Sullivan’s Travels
8371	7.8	Ball of Fire
1982	7.5	Hellzapoppin’
17341	7.4	The Wolf Man
364	7.2	Remember the Day
872	7.1	Mr. Bug Goes to Town
1850	7.1	Johnny Eager
2307	7.0	Tarzan’s Secret Treasure
788	7.0	H.M. Pulham, Esq.
393	6.9	Bedtime Story

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

November 1941: Secret of the Wastelands

Secret of the Wastelands. Derwin Abrahams. 1941.

Oh! This is a Hopalong Cassidy movie! I don’t recall having seen any of these before, but Hopalong himself looks very familiar. According to imdb, William Boyd basically did no other roles after the mid-30s, so I guess I must have seen one of these before?

Looks like he did about 70 of these over a ten-year period (before making the jump to TV), and I’m guessing that this is a pretty undistinguished example of the form.

It definitely has its charms, and I can understand the attraction for children of this era. It’s like a TV series? Only in movie theatres? It looks cheaply made and the plot isn’t very complicated, but it’s kinda fun? Mysteries, hidden tunnels, a slightly awkward love interest thing going on (with the youthful ever-horny sidekick), and a grizzled old coot as the comedic diversion.

It’s very formulaic, but there’s a reason the formula exists.

Surprisingly enough, the Chinese (who looked positively dastardly at the start of this movie) turn out to be good guys!

Oops! Spoilers!

Popular movies in November 1941 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
24665	7.4	Suspicion
4118	7.3	Shadow of the Thin Man
4677	7.3	They Died with Their Boots On
672	7.2	Remorques
1197	7.0	Keep ‘Em Flying
763	6.9	Blues in the Night
295	6.6	Unholy Partners
501	6.6	The Corsican Brothers
335	6.5	Skylark
225	6.5	Go West, Young Lady

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

October 1941: All-American Co-Ed

All-American Co-Ed. LeRoy Prinz. 1941.

Another thing from the box set, and pretty kooky.

It’s a great set-up where they manage to come up with a good explanation for why a guy from an all-male college disguises himself as a woman and goes to an all-female college. I know! The drag isn’t very er fishy, but it’s pretty risque.

There’s some great tunes in here, some over-the-top but pitch perfect performances and it isn’t a second too long. What a nice little surprise.

And it’s the second (and final) movie director LeRoy Prinz did, although he continued to be involved with movies in other capacities. He was mainly known as a choreographer in the 30s and nominated for several Oscars, but this movie looks so great on a scene by scene basis that it’s just incredible that he didn’t do more directing.

This movie isn’t even mentioned on his Wikipedia page.

Popular movies in October 1941 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
118855	8.1	The Maltese Falcon
16506	7.8	How Green Was My Valley
1644	7.5	Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
4470	7.4	49th Parallel
385	7.3	Nothing But the Truth
90494	7.3	Dumbo
2765	7.3	I Wake Up Screaming
797	7.1	One Foot in Heaven
1166	7.1	Swamp Water
878	6.9	Texas

This blog post is part of the Decade series.