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It is a bit of a surprise to me with the low turnout for the current installment of the Director’s Chair series. There are only seventeen submissions this time around, which is a tremendous decrease in participation in comparison to the forty-four articles that were submitted for Event #8. I am not sure why there is a sudden drop in numbers, but it does not signify in difference in the quality of articles that I have for you to read over the next couple of days. The linked articles for today include four movie reviews that have been sent in from two of our participants. I hope you enjoy reading them. In addition, I will temporarily extend the deadline for submission for the current Director’s Chair series. If you happen to have an article or review regarding any of the directorial films from Sidney Lumet, please submit a direct link to the article by e-mail to mattehavoc@gmail before midnight tonight.

Review of Q and A (1990)
Radiator Heaven

Review of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)
John Likes Movies

Review of Running on Empty (1988)
Radiator Heaven

Review of Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
John Likes Movies

Make sure to stop by tomorrow for a couple more film reviews, including a classic film that will make you mad as hell.

URL: http://thenonreview.com
Site Name: The Non-Review
Categories: Reviews, Editorials, Humor
Rating: PG-13

What is the main focus of your site?
Humorous reviews and commentary.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
Make people laugh and pass on some movies others might not know.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
I try to inform others about films but it's also a very open community.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
The site has been up for 6 months. I update at least 5 times a week.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
Meet John Doe, The Science of Sleep, Radio Days

How did you hear about the LAMB?
Random searching.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that's not listed above.
None.

Good news, everyone! We’re back with another edition of “Classic Chops”…

Site Name: The Canadian Cinephile’s Reviews
Suddenly, Last Summer
Submitted by: The Canadian Cinephile’s Reviews

Site Name: Cinema Viewfinder
Blu-ray Review: A Star is Born (1954)
Submitted by: Cinema Viewfinder

Site Name: Silent Volume
The Water Magician (1933)
Submitted by: Silent Volume

Site Name: Obscure Movie Thoughts From an Obscure Movie Fan
Resolution Ten: No#2 – The Searchers
Submitted by: Obscure Movie Thoughts From an Obscure Movie Fan

Site Name: Encore’s World of Film and TV
Life is a Cabaret
Submitted by: Encore’s World of Film and TV

Site Name: My Floating Red Couch
Easy Rider
Submitted by: My Floating Red Couch

Site Name: Cold Fusion Video Reviews
The Great Jesse James Raid (1953)
Submitted by: Cold Fusion Video Reviews

Site Name: Does Writing Excuse Watching?
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Submitted by: Does Writing Excuse Watching?

Site Name: The Best Picture Project
Pride of the Yankees
Submitted by: The Best Picture Project

Site Name: The Ludovico Technique
Classic Rewind: Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Submitted by: Encore’s World of Film and TV

Classic Chops welcomes any essay or post you’ve composed on a film classic—and even though I originally set the criterion at films released in 1965 and before, I have “cheated” a little and included films after that date that I don’t think too many people would dispute are “classics.” (In other words—it’s become my call, which means I wield absolute power…rah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!) If you’ve submitted a link to me and you haven’t seen it included yet—please don’t be discouraged. I don’t intend to leave anybody out—chances are it’s “in the queue.” Just remember, send your submissions to classicchops@gmail.com by next Tuesday (August 3) at 6:00pm EDT…and any questions, comments, suggestions and expense report receipts should be addressed to that same e-mail address as well. Until next time…see you at the movies!

URL: http://mattsmoviereviews.net/
Site Name: Matt's Movie Reviews.net
Categories: Reviews, News, Editorials, Lists, Interviews, Trailers, Images, Movie Posters
Rating: PG-13

What is the main focus of your site?
To write about new and classic films and varied cinematic topics.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
To create an informative, entertaining, and profitable website, while developing a name as a film critic in the online world.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
I have not created an interactive website, however I do stay in touch with readers through my Facebook and Twitter pages.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
Matt's Movie Reviews has been active for 4 years and still going strong.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, JFK

How did you hear about the LAMB?
Via a link from another website.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that's not listed above.
None.

URL: http://www.templeofreviews.com
Site Name: Temple of Reviews
Categories: Reviews, General, Lists
Rating: PG

What is the main focus of your site?
My main focus is cataloging reviews of a diverse range of current to theater or current to home release films.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
I hope to use my blog to help develop myself as a thinker and to further deepen my love of film. Additionally, I hope to use it as a tangible collection of the work I've done thinking and writing about movies. I want to some day look over a vast archive and be proud of how much time I've spent exercising my brain muscles instead of eating salty snacks and getting drunk while zoning out in front of the television (or however else I would have wasted all my time if I didn't start this hobby).

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
Interactive would be nice. I see film blogging as a kind of condensed, focused version of getting into a good discussion about a film. Getting people to actually read and comment is another story entirely.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
I've been running the site for just over the required three months, and have been regularly writing reviews for about six months. I update a couple times a week.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
The Graduate
The Godfather
The 'Burbs

How did you hear about the LAMB?
By clicking a link on a movie blog. Concept in action.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that's not listed above.
None.

URL: http://javabeanrush.blogspot.com/
Site Name: Java's Journey
Categories: Classic Film
Rating: PG

What is the main focus of your site?
Exploring Classic Film with other old movie nuts.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
I enjoy the community of bloggers from around the world who share my interest in film. I learn from them (not just about the genre but about blogging in general), share what I learn and bring my own perspective to the mix. It's just fun.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
I use both methods depending on the content of the blog entry.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
This Classic Movies blog has been active since 2006 (though back then it had a smattering of other topics and a different name). Now it's all about Classic Films.

I post at least twice per week.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
The Heiress (1949) starring Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift & Ralph Richardson.

How did you hear about the LAMB?
I browse blogs a lot, and this one came up in one of those searches.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that's not listed above.
None.

Site: Journalistic Skepticism
The Great Big Academy Awards Project: Best Actress of the 1990s
Submitted by: Journalistic Skepticism

Site: Does Writing Excuse Watching
Sex
Submitted by: Does Writing Excuse Watching
(Note: This is a repost. The link given to last week's entry was broken.)

Site: Magic Lantern Film Blog
10 Movies to Get Excited About for the 2nd Half of 2010
Submitted by: Peter Eramo, Jr.

Site: FlixChatter
A Flix Odyssey – From Vision to Film: Superman Returns
Submitted by: FlixChatter

Site: This Guy Over Here
Have You Seen This? (Scandinavian Edition)
Submitted by: This Guy Over Here

Site: Top10Films
Top 10 Sequels of All Time
Submitted by: Top10Films

Site: CinemaObsessed.com
My Inter-Species Crushes
Submitted by: CinemaObsessed.com

Again, I'm blaming Comic-Con for the lack of submissions this week. Hopefully you all recovered and will be able to send in more for next week. When you do, use the following format and have them sent in by Midnight next Monday night, EST:
Site Name:
Post Title:
Link:
Submitted by:

And send them to weeklylambchops@gmail.com.

ALSO! Don't forget about the Bloody Chops! Sends THOSE to bloodychops@gmail.com and have those sent in by Midnight Friday night EST!

Thanks to everyone who sent stuff in!
-Jason

It's Blusterin' Time!

And remember: Blustering should be a two-way street; if you've asked to be blustered, you better be a blusterer.

If you're new to this feature or need a refresher, click the label at the bottom of this post and see the first few posts. Otherwise, here's the basics:

What I'll do is list a site; you're asked to critique it. But here's the catch: to induce the most honest reactions, don't leave the comment using your normal alias/login - instead, go anonymous, and be as brutally honest (or complimentary) as you wish to be. Also, be specific, and naturally, don't be rude. If I deem anything inappropriate, I'll have no problem deleting the comment.

So, go to the site listed below, familiarize yourself with it for a few minutes, then come back and leave some constructive criticism and/or comments that you have.

Site: A Life in Equinox: A Movie Lover's Journal
LAMB#: 403
URL: http://univarn.blogspot.com/
















If you're up for this treatment for your site (and you're a LAMB), send me an email with the subject "Bluster Me!" If you've already done so, no need to do it again - you're on the list, and these will be going up in order of when I received your email (by the way, it could take a while for your site to be Blustered, since I don't run this more than once a week or so).

N. Raghavan, Rain V (2009)

One reason I like zapping through artist's pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist's statements and curator's notes is that I don't need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work.
The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn't informative, which it often is. It's that it is rarely inspiring.
(Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture - entitled (...) - is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University

There are two things about this short fragment I love.
The first is the choreography of joy. The slow-motion allows us to better appreciate the flow of the common movement, the combining of the bodies, the contrast between them and everything that happens around them.
But there is something else. The dance becomes obvious at the end, when the movement continues beyond what we expected. Yet there is one earlier moment, one step of the girl coming from "our" side, which makes that clear. At a very precise point, she deviates from the way she has been running, her body bends like a bow and then moves sideways. That is when the simple vectors of meeting become something else - something more complex, less obvious. The bodies, now, create a space for our meeting to go beyond the embrace.

It is the pleasure of imagining a performance - or rather, of imagining a universe. A narrative, an aesthetics, an experience, a unity.
It is the pleasure of imagining a liveness, a directness, a presence.
The pleasure of experiencing the echo, the recording, the extract, the fragment of a copy of a copy. The pleasure Plato was so afraid of.
It is the joy of watching something on a small pixellated video image and imagining it live and juicily 3D.
It is the ecstatic moderato of my computer screen, of yours, which acts out the world that supposedly tastes better off-screen (heck, it tastes). Yet it is not off-screen, not in the performance space, but here, at this very desk, dressed in dark-green boxers, brown socks and a t-shirt, among the hills of papers and books and accompanied by the delicate sound of the washing machine and an occasional sms, that I experience it. The pleasure of absence. The ecstatic moderato.

Fischli and Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), video, 30', 1987


Honda Ad, 2003



OK Go - This Too Shall Pass, 2009

I remember the choreographer João Fiadeiro once showing Fischli & Weiss's work during some seminar or workshop and talking about what in his mind made it so impressive: necessity. Although it might seem like anything can happen, what happens is exactly what needs to happen. A tautology that evolves in time? But isn't any proof precisely that - a dynamic tautology?
So is it because it's a proof that it's so appealing?
A proof of what?
Of how things go, we are tempted to say.
Which, of course, is just silly talk. It's precisely because things don't go this way that we enjoy it so much. It's because the unexpected becomes necessary.

What about this "evolution"? The work of art turned into a commercial turned into a music video. Don't expect any moral judgement on that. Actually, I enjoyed all three videos.
We could discuss the question of authorship. But we won't. (Fischli & Weiss threatened to sue Honda).
Here's what I've been pondering on: what exactly are the differences?
Because, once you've accepted that they're all in the same category (actually, this type of inventions is called either Heath Robinson contraptions (UK), or (more commonly) Rube Goldberg Machines (US) and have been in popular culture at least since the beginning of the 20th century), you can see into how very different they are.
So what makes it an art project, a commercial, a music video?
If we turn the volume off, what changes?
If we put music, or switch it from one video to another?
The timing, the materials, the way things go and pass.
What sort of universe appears in each of them?
Yes, that's precious: they each have their own universe. They are entities. You can easily find yourself around them, with their texture, their dynamics, their smell...
One more thing: aren't they each hiding in their specific ways this very basic urge for things to make sense?
If that is so, it's beyond necessity or discovery. It's the comfort of order. The sense that somewhere beyond the frame, things are just waiting to come into action, to move into view. And their potential is already in perfect harmony with the moment when they will become what they are meant to be. The best of possible worlds.
It shouldn't come as a surprize that these delicately balancing certainties remind us of childhood.

Do you know Tino Sehgal? You know, the artist that doesn't allow any pictures taken of his works? And doesn't write any introduction, or artist statement? Or make written agreements with museums? That wants no material artifacts in his works?
Does it matter what the works are?
They are performative. More: they are performances. They are people doing things in exhibition spaces. They are things happening with people within an exhibition framework.
They could be happening to others (say, someone kissing). Or to you (say, someone talking with you).
You might never discover which part was the work. Yet somehow, you often do.

Once again: Does it matter what the works are? Once you experience something, what good is the analysis?
But we are pretty smart animals. We may experience, and still want to think about it. We may want to decide what we think, and if we will go to see this thing again or not. We may rework this experience in our mind until we decide, say, that this is just not enough. That a good ice-cream would have done the job. Or a meeting with a friend. Or both combined. Maybe in a museum. Maybe accompanied by a stranger, having a conversation about progress. The luxury of conversational art. Now isn't that progressive.

Then again, what is wrong with living a series of perfectly good conversations put into a gentle, clean formal frame? Can't we just accept this? What is it that makes one (me) so voracious?
Is it the fact I've never actually seen a Sehgal, done a Sehgal?
Isn't the picture enough?
Or the reviews that seem to make a huge effort in taking the mimetic weight off the image and putting some of it on words?
Paradoxically, all the effort put into keeping it live seem to make us focus not on the thing, but on this very effort. Would Tino Sehgal be at the Guggenheim had he allowed taking pictures? So what exactly is the work, here? How come I feel it so clearly, if it's all about presence? Or am I just feeling its double, its fake, the afterthought? But isn't that crucial in experience? Doesn't that re-constitute the experience once it is over? Can one re-construct something one did not experienced in the first place?
You would have to have been there. The most dreaded sentence in the world. What are we supposed to do with it? Take a hidden snapshot?

Tino Sehgal is on at the New York Guggenheim until March 10.

Bloodshedding pieces of black-and-white happiness.
The unfair balance of the picture.

The wider picture. The bloody wider picture always giving it the color that wasn't there in the first place.
Notice: the wider picture is never the first place. It comes as we back up, until we are nowhere to be found, impressed by the relation of the Thing with that wide horizon, that swift encompassing of the Other into the Thing.

The unfair balance of the picture. Nothing should ever be framed. Frames should be prohibited, forcing us into oblivion, into focusing on the End nearest us. Who knows how many Santa Clauses are necessary?

The unfair balance of the picture.

The pictures are by, in order of appearance, Diane Arbus, Mikołaj Chylak, Diane Arbus, Fischli & Weiss.

What is it that we like about simplicity? Is it not that it's close to us? It is attainable, like something that is nearly us. Or, to put it differently - an it that almost makes it into me. Thus, an imaginary community. Yes, if I dared, I would say simplicity gives us an imaginary community. A universe we don't need to adhere to, as it has already adhered to us.



The video, directed by Johannes Nyholm, is both a music video for Little Dragon, and a pilot of Nyholm's short film Dreams from The Woods.

Two pictures from the Visit series (2007/8) by Filip Berendt.
The idea is so simple and to the point that it is irritating. Berendt put an ad in a newspaper saying he wants to make installations in people's homes out of the things he finds there and take pictures of them. Some people answered. He went to their homes, and, well, did what he said he would do.
The series won him the Sittcomm award last year.