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Black Irish

About Me

“Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”
- John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

Current Anticipated Films:

Anna Christie (Jacques Feyder, 1931)
A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932)
Mistérios de Lisboa (Raúl Ruiz, 2010)
Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
The Steamroller and the Violin (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1961)
Werckmeister Harmóniák (Béla Tarr, 2000)

R.I.P.
Theo Angelopoulos (1935 – 2012)

Latest Update

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Fritz Lang

What makes his cinema especially fascinating is it's stylistic exactitude, with just the right amount of light and shadow, the rest left to choices in camera placement and editing. Resulting in a strange, restrained, even contradictory, expressionism which relies in part upon a horrible clarity. One which reflects individuals' fever-dream reasoning, distorted and beyond logic, finding meaning and purpose in people, events and objects that would seem insignificant otherwise. Unable to discern reality from delusion. Not an ascetic, but a modernist mystic whose faith lies in the anxiety, paranoia and cruelty of humanity.

Favorite Films

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Au hasard Balthazar

The Story of Marie and Julien

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Caught

Lists

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Style

Auteur-driven
Melancholy
Serene & subtle
Other-worldly

Following

Following 49 people

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SOYBEAN

Dylan Ibrahim

odilonvert

Jose Sarmiento Hinojosa

arsaib

Wall

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odilonvert

8Feb12

My Appointment?....

Black Irish

9Feb12

The book you were/are reading, Appointment in Samarra. Had a feeling I was gonna be too vague . . .
odilonvert

9Feb12

Oh, ha ha! No, not finished yet. :D
Black Irish

9Feb12

How's it coming along?
odilonvert

9Feb12

It's getting more and more foreboding...

Wu Yong

1Feb12

Yeah, it's a great film. It's so great that it just looks effortless. I suppose that's why people would not discuss it... it doesn't have the audacity of something like Maltese Falcon or Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but everyone is perfect in it. Always sympathetic, never overly-sentimental. That's a hard balance to strike in a film like that.

odilonvert

31Jan12

Just dropping by to say hi. :) I seem to recall you sent me something to listen to on youtube a week or so ago. My head's a mess as always, I'll try to remember to listen to it this week. What else are you listening to these days?

Black Irish

31Jan12

That's perfectly fine, no rush. Not listening to much, mainly various tracks from Burns' The Civil War since I've been watching that lately. Really just trying to focus on my reading at the moment, I'm fairly [which is to say, not really] close to actually finishing TWO books. (Gasp.)
odilonvert

31Jan12

Yes! That's great! :) I finished reading Chandler's The Long Goodbye and am zooming through John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra -- ever read it?
Black Irish

31Jan12

Unfortunately I haven't, but I've wanted to and I've been aware of it for awhile. Though it has an extraordinary title, to say the least. Have you read anything of O'Hara's before? I'm about halfway through both As I Lay Dying and Intruder in the Dust at the moment, and I think I'm enjoying the latter more [but AILD will probably benefit more from multiple re-readings.] | The film of the latter was excellent enough to inspire me to pick up my copy. Hoping I can continue with Faulkner after one or both of them [recently got copies of Light in August and Knight's Gambit as well.]

Ben.

30Jan12

I have six left to see but I figured it was time to fan him though. All I need to do now is wait for Artificial Eye to release Volume III and I will have all his major works.

Black Irish

30Jan12

Ah, gotcha. Would you recommend any of the AE sets as a blind buy?
Ben.

30Jan12

I would highly recommend them both (Volume III is being released in February). And I'm fairly certain you've seen me post about them being region free. The only issue is that they are encoded in the PAL format. A television with PAL capabilities or a DVD/Blu-Ray Player with upscaling capabilities will resolve that issue. They look great too, colors look natural and no print is digitally censored (nude people look really weird with a big blur over their junk).
Black Irish

30Jan12

Though they are region-free, I've been wanting to get a RF player sometime in the, hopefully, near future, would that solve the problem?
Ben.

30Jan12

No, television and films released in the United Kingdom are encoded in the PAL format which runs at 25fps. Films and television in the United States are encoded in NTSC, which runs at 24fps. You can broadcast a PAL signal through a NTSC source but the frame rate and sound will be inconsistent and the image will be filled with warps and static. However, when films are unconverted ( via a Blu-Ray player or an up-converting DVD player) they play above 25fps and it becomes a non-issue. You can however simply avoid all of this if the television and DVD player you use can broadcast in both PAL and NTSC.
Black Irish

30Jan12

I see, I'll have to see whether the ones I have do [though I highly doubt that.] This is something I need to learn more about. Thanks for the heads-up.