Eclipse 1943: The Man in Grey

I’m starting to wonder whether the Eclipse box set series is less about resurrecting lost film gems and more about just utilising the Janus Films library. (Janus Films and Criterion have the same owners.)

Because most of these movies carry the Janus title card, and… er… more than a few of these movies haven’t really seemed like… they would be the kinds of movies people would want to resurrect?

But perhaps I’m wrong; I’m just a quarter of the way through these movies.

This one looks pretty promising, though.

I say, this is quite entertaining. It’s a proper slightly-over-the-top melodrama.

Uhm.

Oh, right, James Mason.

I know!

So many coats.

But unfortunately… the tension dissipates and then you’re just left with a kinda not very interesting drama.

I think this started off being really entertaining, but then it got bogged down.

The Man in Grey. Leslie Arliss. 1943.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Eclipse 1969: Žert

This is the final movie on this Czech new wave box set from Eclipse, and… it kinda looks really good? Which makes a change.

EEK SHOES IN BED

This is kinda riveting. It movies so fluidly between “the present” and either remembrance or fantasy (it’s hard to tell whether the movie is him thinking about how he imagines things will happen)… it’s original and fresh.

And looks great. Talented cinematography and snappy editing. And great casting for the somewhat creepy protagonist.

It’s fascinating the line the filmmakers are teetering on — this character was totally mistreated by the Czech regime in the fifties — but in the movie’s current time, he’s a total sleazeball. Any other movie would have been building sympathy for him, but this movie is like “uh nuh. that’d be too easy”.

This is totes fab.

The Joke. Jaromil Jires. 1969.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Eclipse 1968: Rozmarné léto

I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by this Criterion box set of 60s Czech(oslovakian but not really) new wave movies. I mean, it’s not necessarily the plots or anything, but just how sloppy these movies look. Which is probably totally unfair. I mean… if you’re waiting for the Soviets to roll in and crush everything, perhaps getting the perfect framing on your shots isn’t the priority?

But this one looks better, at least. Even though I have absolutely no idea what they’re going on about. I think it’s supposed to be an amusing, absurdist thing?

Possibly?

Nice long johns! Do those things still exist?

But it’s like they don’t actually look through the viewfinder? I mean, that’s an almost striking shot — if they’d gotten rid of those people sitting on the fence, which just makes it look awkward.

The casting is also really weird.

Capricious Summer. Jirí Menzel. 1968.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

14×10%

What? Already? It seems like I was doing a posting like this just the other week…

How time flies — it was three weeks ago. But this was a speedy stretch, and we actually decreased the numbers of open bugs, from 2590 to 2466, which, if my mathematics knowledge is correct, is … more than a hundred. Approx. Don’t take my word for it.

Oh, yeah, if you’re just joining the show, this is the blog post where I natter on a bit about Emacs development, through the lens of traversing the Emacs bug tracker.

To zoom out:

We’re on a downward trend, but I feel like it’s taking more effort recently. I didn’t implement a single significant new feature this cycle, but just concentrated on triage and fixing (small) stuff, and it still was… a lot of work.

And it looks like the number of opened bugs is pretty flat? Or… is it? So I made a new chart:

Aha! The number of bugs opened per month was in the 150 region from 2015 to 2020, but the last couple years, we’ve trended towards 200 per month. Which says something, but I’m not sure what.

How do you interpret a higher bug count? Is Emacs getting buggier, or are we just adding more new stuff (that then has bugs (everything does)), or is the number of users increasing, so we’re getting more reports? Difficult to say, but I think it’s mostly the second point. To take just one example (but a big one) — the pure Gtk branch was merged a couple months ago, and that led to a surge in bug reports from users trying that out.

Let’s see… did Emacs get anything new and exciting since the last blog post? Uhm… Oh, yeah:

Emacs can now (courtesy of Håkon Flatval and Po Lu) use alpha backgrounds (i.e., let windows behind Emacs frames shine through).

In total, there’s been 610 commits, for an average of 28 per day. Ish.

Next stretch is just 246 bugs, but I think I’ll be concentrating on implementing things instead of looking at old bug reports, so it’ll probably take a whole lot longer until the next blog post in this series.

And I may be taking some time off, but whenever I say that, it never happens.