the best non-Italian neorealist film I’ve come across
This has nothing in common with neorealist filmmaking except being about poor people. Instead it’s a riff on Capra — and it’s a pretty good one?
OK, it gets less Capra-ish after a while.
There’s strong scenes in here, but the movie as a whole, while amiable, isn’t completely convincing.
One Wonderful Sunday. Akira Kurosawa. 1947.
This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.
WHAT ARE THE SPECIFIC CUSTOMER SERVICES
But I do not know what to do this information.
And er OK.
Hm. This is from 1946?
I guess I’m surprised that this is so… that this is didactically explaining that the previous Japanese gummint were cads and scoundrels and that the Japanese invasion in Manchuria was a crime.
I mean, was that something that would be a hug box office draw in Japan, a year after Nagasaki?
Or was this financed by the CIA? They financed a lot of cool stuff in the post war years, like The Paris Review. (A bit.)
The lines are so naturalistic.
I was excited to start this box set, because I’d forgotten that there were Kurosawa box sets in the Eclipse series. (Yes — two!)
And this film does have fine scenes. And the lead, played by Setsuko Hara (star of Officially The Best Movie Ever, Tokyo Story) is fantastic.
But this isn’t a good movie. It seems more like a sketch towards a movie. A demo tape of set pieces later to be stitched into a something. It is an early Kurosawa movie, though, and he got acclaimed later — for good reasons.
No Regrets For Our Youth. Akira Kurosawa. 1946.
This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.
Is that true today, I wonder? (Substitute billionaire.)
Well, that’s an original way to start one of these movies — with Rembrandt well established, rich and surrounded by fans.
Most amiable.
Laughton is wonderful in this. His mannerisms are so precise and fit with the character he’s playing perfectly.
And also fits the movie — this isn’t one of those high powered docu dramas. You know, one of those that tries to fit a narrative to a life? Instead, it sort of meanders? In a very pleasant way.
Some of the pacing reminds me a bit of Bergman’s lighter 50s movies, so I’m guessing he was a fan.
And they’re having great fun recreating the tableaux from Rembrandt’s paintings:
Tee hee.
This movie is great — easily the best of the four Korda-related movies in this box set.
Alexander Korda had an interesting career. It seems like about half his movies were box office smashes, and half bombed. (This was a bomb.) But it’s not like there’s a huge difference between the films. OK, the Henry VIII film had a built in attraction in being called “The Private Life of” and being about a scandalous king. But it’s not like it was a sex romp anyway.
This is a meandering, melancholic movie, so I can see why it wouldn’t be a good date film. But still… there’s a lot of fun in between the sad bits.
Rembrandt. Alexander Korda. 1936.
This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.
I haven’t really been doing my bug patrol thing this cycle, so I’m kinda surprised that I’m doing a blog post now. But the numbers speak for themselves: target achieved. So this has been virtually exclusively daily new bug reports and patches merged.
Oh, hi — for new readers, this is where I natter on a bit about what’s going on in Emacs development through the lens of spelunking through the Emacs bug tracker. But not actually any spelunking this time.
I’ve barely been involved with the most important thing that’s happened this cycle, except as a cheerleader. Namely:
EMACS NO LONGER CHOKES ON LONG LINES!!!1!
Gregory Heytings has developed a brand new, general approach to this tricky problem. The problem stems from how Emacs handles lines, basically: Many functions, like font-locking, run from redisplay, and wants to determine the syntax by looking at a line as (more or less) a unit. And that leads to Emacs hanging if the mode’s font-lock rules hasn’t been written in a careful manner, and they mostly haven’t.
When I’m talking about “long lines” here, I’m not talking about 120 columns or something, but files that have lines that are, say, 1MB long. This doesn’t happen in files people are normally editing, but in data dump files like JSON files, minified Javascript, XML, SQL database dumps and the like. Opening a file like that in Emacs 28 could make Emacs hang completely — and it happens during redisplay, so you can’t C-g out of it either. You just have to kill Emacs.
It’s the most embarrassing thing in Emacs, and that’s gone now. Thank you, Gregory.
Now, there’s still a bunch of details to be ironed out. The current approach sacrifices some font-locking accuracy (etc.) while displaying these humongous lines, and there’s ongoing discussion (and work happening by Gregory and Eli Zaretskii) to tweak bits in this area. So it’s a work in progress, but those inaccuracies are of a completely different magnitude than Emacs hanging on you if you happen to open some unfortunate file.
So what have I been doing? I’ve taken a couple of holidays and going to music festivals here and there. The result:
The number of open bugs has *gasp* increased! We started this cycle at 2028 open bugs, and we’re now at 2051 open bugs.
But I haven’t just been slacking off — what’s taken most of my time has been a fiddly build thing, which is probably not interesting to users, but should make maintenance in this area easier in the future.
It’s about how Emacs accesses doc strings from autoloaded functions. Previously, this was done by generating a DOC file by running a parser over the loaddefs.el files we had. This led to other weird hacks in the Emacs Lisp reader (!):
That is, you have to make sure you format the doc strings in loaddefs.el files in Just The Right Way, so that the Lisp reader could ignore them. This One Weird Trick has led to some head scratching from basically anybody trying to understand how this all ties together, and why some strings (during the Emacs build) would seemingly disappear magically.
This is a very, very old thing — probably three decades or more — and there’s always some trepidation when dealing with things that are connected in these magical ways, but all this magic is now gone, and the doc strings in loaddefs files are handled normally. (And the loaddefs files are now also byte-compiled, which is nice, because then the byte compiler can tell us when there’s something wonky in them. I’m all in favour of offloading tedious tasks to the computers. Sorry, future AI overlords; I’m sure that came off as anti computer chauvinism. Sorry! Don’t digitise me!)
But ensuring that altering this decades-old build system didn’t break anything took me weeks and a gazillion Emacs builds, so there wasn’t much time to work on other fun stuff, and there aren’t a lot of new user-visible features this time around. Just bug fixes.
Oh, yeah, I forgot that I also added a new mechanism for defining and theming icons. And that’s also a work in progress, but perhaps there’ll be more progress now that most of the music festivals are over…
