Tonight’s feature presentation was His Girl Friday (1940), and it left a bad taste. Summary: a chick digs a guy who’ll do anything, including framing innocent people for felonies, to win her.

Do they still make movies in which a reporter dupes someone for a story and then repents? (It Happened One Night (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Roman Holiday (1953) . . . )

Watching Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936, starring John Gielgud so young that I couldn’t place him), I think I’ve spotted Hitchcock – but my first thought was “there’s Rumpole!”.

Claire Wolfe enjoys Firefly, film at eleven. She’s not so keen on Kaylee:

The only element that didn’t ring true to me was this little gamin girly they made the ship’s mechanic. She sort of “intuits” the machinery of the ship – not with alien powers, but just with a loveable girliness. I didn’t believe it for one second, and pictured real mechanics groaning at the idiocy.

I wonder what she’ll think of River later on.

I’m no technician, but let me say I didn’t get that vibe off Kaylee at all. It is established in later episodes (Shindig and Out of Gas come to mind) that she is simply a mechanical wiz who makes it look easy.

I dreamed I went to see a movie that was set in San Francisco, but the producers wanted to avoid location shooting, so all the street scenes were stock film with blue-screening — and the stock was from different periods. So we’d follow the actor down Church Street toward Market Street, seeing the intersection as it was in the Forties, and as we came closer it (somehow smoothly) transformed into the present.

November: I don’t remember having heard then about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a movie made without scenery.

2006: See also.

Wanting to learn about database programming, it occurred to me to resume work on my fullerene search code. I’m a bit surprised to find that I haven’t touched it in two years.

Speaking of surprises – Angel the vampire had (as far as I can see) the same makeup in Buffy as in his own series, so it’s odd that Harmony’s is completely different. I liked the Sunnydale version better.

I used to sneer at those so tone-deaf as to mistake the soundtrack of Conan the Barbarian (1982) for Carl Orff’s arrangement of the Carmina Burana. (Which, by the way, ought to be pronounced cármina, not carmîna.)

This last Frinight I was at the Paramount theater in Oakland to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a slightly longer edit than usual; and before it there was shown a trailer for Conan with, guess what, the Orff. I gather it’s common for movie trailers to be made before the feature’s soundtrack is complete, requiring the trailer’s music to be borrowed from elsewhere.

Continuing to catch up on events in Sunnydale, I find the writing sloppier in season 5. My remarks at greater length. Another fan replies:

When Buffy was rockin’ this sort of trivia didn’t matter. The show was about Buffy’s tears, Xander’s angst, Willow’s neuroses, Giles’ inhibitions.