Eclipse 1949: I Shot Jesse James


This is a box set of three early Sam Fuller movies, and as such is an outlier in the Eclipse series — the films are mostly Japanese and French things where Janus Films had distribution rights.

And it’s odd that Criterion wouldn’t just release these movies as part of their regular series. I mean, Fuller’s a popular director. But I guess they know what they’re doing.

Anyway.

How er touching.

Oh yeah! I had forgotten that I had (started to) see The Assasinatetc, but it was terrible.

So this is an earlier version of the same story, but it has some of the same set pieces, like the bathing scene?

SPOILER ALERT Ford kills James.

It’s fascinating just how full on this is — the movie is like “of course Ford’s killing him” and then just gets on with it within the first twenty minutes.

It’s great.

This is really weird. I assume that this didn’t actually happen?

No, it’s apparently true:

This sentiment clashed with the general public opinion at the time of James’s death that it had been time for James to be stopped by any means. For a period, Bob earned money by posing for photographs as “the man who killed Jesse James” in dime museums. He also appeared on stage with his brother Charles, reenacting the murder in a touring stage show.

This looks really good. It apparently had a minuscule budget and shooting schedule, but you totally can’t tell.

But…

It’s just that the last half of the movie isn’t as good as it should be?

Good performances and all.

Some scenes zing and other scenes are just there.

John Ireland is kinda perfect here — he does dim well.

La nuit américaine.

I Shot Jesse James. Samuel Fuller. 1949.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

50%

A special quick edition of my “%” Emacs development blog series: We now have some magic numbers!!!1!

Today, we dipped below 2219, which is a magical number, because:

The most open bugs we had was 4437, and (/ 4437.0 2) => 2218.5.

50% down from the top! Let the celebrations start! Carnivals in the streets! Crowds going mad!

We’ve basically shaved a decade’s worth of bugs off, and we’re down to 2012 levels. Or 2011, if you wanna disregard that bump…

Oh, and another magical number:

2222 — should have waited until May 22nd, I guess. More twos is more magical, right? Right.

This concludes this session on Numerology in Computing.

Eclipse 1932: 大人の見る絵本

The previous Ozu movie was fantastic, and once again, the Eclipse DVD comes without any soundtrack. So I’m listening to reggae bangers.

Various: Harmony, Melody & Style (1)

This is really good… I have no idea where this is headed. Is it just gonna be about these kids?

This movie has the best featured review on imdb of all times:

Several days ago I saw a perfect print provided to the PFA by the Japan Foundation, with benshi Midori Sawato accompanying. The performance, of course, was exquisite, if sedate in keeping with the film and Ozu’s reputation. Whether by chance or ingenuity the PFA placed Sawato on a raised platform, so you couldn’t look at her face without also seeing the film, or the film without seeing her. Her male intonations, though with at least no obvious satire, rival those of Laurie Anderson or Lily Tomlin. But I’ve been wondering what on earth to say about Ozu. He hadn’t discovered yet his low camera angle, and the pacing’s not quite as slow as it would become. I’m afraid all that’s stayed with me that anyone else might not say, is that, perhaps oddly for a film about a typical family of four, Ozu’s camera again and again frames groups of three. I can’t remember whether he does this later. Maybe Ozu just liked an image size that makes three optimum. Already, without the formality to come, his frame was beginning to solidify. Don’t know. Something to think about is all.

Various: 300% Dynamite!

I don’t know what’s going on half of the time… the kids are apparently really shocked to find out their father have hairy ankles?

Those are long johns.

According to the liner notes on the DVD, this is the first Ozo film to “remain in circulation”. I’m not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean, but I guess they’re saying tat it was continued to be shown in Japan… until today? I ave no idea.

And it’s a compelling movie, but not as good as Tokyo Chorus. It’s all about the horrors of being a child, subject to any neighbourhood bully.

Various: This Is Reggae Music

I Was Born, But…. Yasujirô Ozu. 1932.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

16×10%

Whaa… it’s been less than a month since the last of these posts (wherein I give a report from my gamified Emacs bug tracker spelunking).

I’ve been using various ways to select bug reports to handle since I started on this back in… 2019? Yes. I started, of course, with reports about things that I had experience with (Gnus, eww, etc), but I soon ran out of things to do that way.

So instead I started looking through all bug reports that hadn’t had any responses, and then all bug reports I had been the last person to respond (they have a tendency to end with “So I think we should do <foo>, anybody have any comments?” and then nobody does. So then I would do <foo>.

But then I ran out of those, too, so I started just sorting all the bug reports by the length of the discussion. It looks like this:

And this 10% stretch!

All the way to the bottom, Maggie! (Severed Heads Sample)

I made it all of the way to the bottom, Maggie!

The longest bug thread had 135 messages.

It turns out that, contrary to what I had imagined, many of those well-discussed bug reports had actionable conclusions: That is, after discussing something back and forth for a couple of years, the conclusion was that indeed we should do <foo>, but then nobody did.

So I did that now, which explains why this is the speediest ten-percenter in quite a while:

Started April 13th, done May 8th.

Of course, reading those threads too some time, but figuring out what to do usually takes more time.

Anyway, that means that there aren’t really anything big new feature to report this time over (except that Tree Sitter has landed on a feature branch), just a buttload of bug fixes and small new features. Here’s some of them:

Easier Scripting

Emacs now has an -x switch designed to make scripting easier. With the above, you can do:

Emacs almost had this capability before, but it was a bit messy and not very convenient.

Restarting Emacs

When trying stuff out in Emacs, you want to be able to restart Emacs conveniently so that you can see that things work as you want them to. A new M-x restart-emacs command now makes things easier.

*Help* improvements

My mission to make the help buffers prettier and easier to read continues, and menus which used to be explained this way…

… are now displayed this way:

You can now also edit variable values, and you can keep the *Help* window selected (without popping to other windows when clicking on buttons in that window).

C-h m has also been reformatted. It used to look like this:

It’s now:

I.e., that endless list of global minor modes has been moved to after the major mode.

Double-buffering on Windows

Emacs on Windows now has double-buffering (courtesy of Po Lu), so there should be less flickering when displaying animated images, and less flickering overall.

OK, I’m not going to go through the entire NEWS file; it’s just smaller items like this:

Lots and lots of teensy stuff. (As well as a buttload of bug fixes; about 30 commits per day.)

Well, onward and upward… literally. Because I’m now making my way back up again in the list, going through the reports I either skipped going downwards, or just missed (due to a buglet in debbugs-gnu: it didn’t sort merged bugs stably, so they appeared arbitrarily at the point of one of the bug reports in the list, so I missed them, at random, when making my way down the list).

We started this stretch at 2400 open bugs, and we’re now down to 2264. Which means that the next 10% is just 226. Mua ha ha.