Century 1978: Interiors

Interiors. Woody Allen. 1978.

Oh, right, this is Woody Allen’s first Bergman rip-off. I mean, his first drama film.

I honestly thought this was going to be better. And the cinematography is totes amazeballs: The subdued colour scheme and the unshowy angles. It’s so calm and understated.

But I feel that basically all the actors except Geraldine Page fail. She’s flawless as her character, while all the other actors flail around doing American 70s Realist Acting, which is just a step above American 80s TV Acting. While they’re good actors, it just doesn’t work in this Bermanish setting. They just work a smidgen too hard on their emoting, especially when talking.

Perhaps I’m being too negative here. It does get better after the first third or so is over. Or perhaps I’m just getting used to that style of acting again.

“It’s been such a long time since I made love to a woman I didn’t feel inferior to. Or am I being tactless?”

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Century 1977: The Duellists

The Duellists. Ridley Scott. 1977.

I had to choose between watching the bluray of Eraserhead or this (both made in 1977), and I chose this. It’s the film Ridley Scott directed before Alien and then Blade Runner, both of which are er rather good. (I especially love Alien.) So I was curious as to what he was up to before doing those two films.

I should have chosen the bluray Eraserhead. It’s been I while since I saw that, and it was on VHS.

Hm… Ah! Keith Carradine and David Carradine aren’t the same person! In any case, he’s not a very compelling lead character.

There aren’t enough eyes in the world to give this film the eye-roll it deserves.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Century 1975: Love and Death

Love and Death. Woody Allen. 1975.

Woody Allen is terribly controversial at the moment, but this is an incredibly funny film. Diane Keaton is perfection and the one-liners keep on coming at you. Not to mention all the physical comedy.

It does tend to lose its steam with some regularity, and the standup-derived bits don’t always work. And there are some jokes (“I have come to the conclusion that the best thing is… blonde, 12 year-old girls. Two of them, whenever possible.”) that perhaps make you go more “eh?” in the current context than it did back then.

But I had forgotten that Woody Allen could be as hilarious as he’s in this film. It’s mostly a parody of all those insufferable Russian epic novels, but he manages to sneak in a couple of pokes at Ingmar Bergman as well.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Home Renovations

I’m not er very well versed in the mysteries of balcony furniture. But I bought this slatted thing years ago and it’s gotten sadder every year. And not it looks like this:

Something had to be done! So I rummaged around in the Cupboard of Mysteries and found this:

That I’m pretty sure I’ve never bought, so perhaps it’s something that just came with me from a previous apartment or something. It’s “vaseline oil” (is that a real thing?), white spirit and perfume. So I slathered it onto the slatted thing (which took forever because of all the complicated joints, and…

Magic!

So I definitely have to remember to do that again in ten years time, whether it needs it or not. I’m setting my calendar as we speak.

Oh, yeah, summer arrived early in Oslo this year…

Concerts in Oslo

I maintain a site that list concerts in Oslo.

In Facebook’s continuing war on its users, the events API was discontinued without warning a month ago. (That is, they may allow access to some apps after doing an individual review, but somehow I suspect that allowing access to a service that tries to drive foot traffic to venues that use Facebook to host their calendars won’t be one of those special apps, because Facebook never wants anybody to leave Facebook ever, I think?)

About a quarter of the venues have their event listings on Facebook only, so that’s a rather big blow against having a useful concert listing site.

So I spent an evening reimplementing Facebook event web page scraping, and while doing that I started thinking about whether I should fancify my Concerts in Oslo web site. Scraping an image and a summary from the event pages didn’t seem insurmountable… Just find the largest image and the most coherent textual part of the HTML and there you are. (You have to filter out the “COOKIES EXIST! DID YOU KNOW THAT!” texts on most pages, because they’re often the longest texts, though.)

What took most work was trying to determine how this data should be loaded. In total, all the extra data is about 45MB, so just having it all in that initial table doesn’t really work. And I wanted to keep the data structures the same, so that the apps would also continue to work.

I first tried displaying the event summaries on hovering, but that was insanely annoying. Then I tried expanding the table when scrolling into view, and that was even more annoying, because things would move around a lot and you’d get confused.

UX is hard!

So I settled on pre-expanding the bottom border of each table line and then putting the event info in an absolutely-positioned div relative to the line. It’s a crime against CSS! But it works!

And now I don’t have to do any work on the site… until Facebook changes their HTML again.