Please Help Me, I’m Falling (Off the Radar)

Okay, there may have been quite a long spell of radio silence here, I’m aware of that. Well, there are several reasons for that, most of which I won’t bore you with, but some of it had to do with the progressing length of the pieces I wrote. Because as some of you may have noticed, after years of writing short reviews, I had been developing a tendency towards longer and longer pieces, mainly because I felt I had more to say. This hasn’t changed really, but long pieces tend to take longer to materialize obviously, which partly explains the declining frequency of my posting here. Besides this, there have been quite a lot of pieces on which I had started, but never got around to finishing… for instance I have been thinking about a rather long piece on exploitation and trash cinema, for which I have in fact already collected a wealth of material. But the more I kept thinking about the subject, the more it started to open up, and it actually pushed me into several rigorous new directions which made me rethink the whole concept of the piece. In short, it isn’t nearly ready to be born yet and as I am patiently awaiting its birth I’ve decided to give this blog something of an overhaul. In fact, I've decided to create another blog which will be the main focus of my energy, with the old one remaining mostly dormant probably, although I will keep it on for the longer and more in-depth pieces.

So, what will be new? First, my writing will be in English from now on. Nothing too earth-shattering of course, but simply my belated acknowledgement of this global village we’re now living in, to borrow McLuhan’s famous phrase. Second, starting at the beginning of 2014, I will embark on a new series of short film capsules entitled Please Help Me, I’m Falling (Off the Radar). The main impetus behind it has been the fact that at the end of every year we are swamped with an endless parade of “best of” lists of every kind and variety. There’s nothing really wrong with that, except that I tend to be rather bored with the repetition of it all – every year the same kind of movies that get mentioned can become quite monotonous. But there’s also another, more serious problem with this, which is more or less the same as our world economy: instead of a leveling out of wealth, the differences only seem to get bigger: the rich get richer and the poor poorer. And so it is with movies: the already well-known pictures get even more exposure, thereby obscuring the less mentioned ones. I understand the value and even necessity of a canon, but try scratching a bit under the surface and you’ll be surprised at the wealth you’ll find there.

Or so it would seem. Because it has been my general experience that very few people are actually able or willing to do just this. I rate every film I see on a website, called WhatIWatch and I’ve observed two distinct trends: first, not a week goes by without my having to add several movies to the site’s database, which of course means I’m the first user there to have seen that picture. Since this has been going on for years now, I’m kind of getting lonely. Of course, I see every movie together with my amazing boyfriend Nika, but since we have been involved in something of a ‘Persona’ kind of relationship for years, I don’t really consider him a different person anymore, which more or less means I’m still the only one I know who has seen all these pictures. So that has got to change.

If I repeatedly complain about why people are blind for this or that aspect (and I will), it’s not because I’m simply just a contrarian, although I have of course been accused of this. In fact, I want nothing more than just belong and agree with everybody, just like everyone wants this deep down (people who claim otherwise are lying), which brings us to my other observed trend: that of the movies other people have in fact seen, there’s an astounding high percentage where I deviate from the norm considerably. Sometimes I rate pictures lower than most people, but this isn’t really common – usually I tend to be more generous with my scores than most and I see masterpieces everywhere where most people apparently only see an average picture. This of course could be attributed to my lack of critical understanding of these movies, but even if that were the case, I think it only fair to try to explain these differences. And that’s more or less exactly what Please Help Me, I’m Falling (Off the Radar) will try do to: shedding light not only on some incredibly fantastic but sadly forgotten movies while in the process also illuminating why I seem to perceive the world radically different from most people. “Stan Brakhage wants to make you see”, critic Fred Camper once famously wrote about one of my favorite avant-garde filmmakers. Well, so do I.

I’ve made it made goal of the year 2014 to create a list of 100 movies, basically in no specific order. The mathematical wonder in me makes me realize this will mean an average of two movies a week I have to discuss, which probably will be quite difficult to accomplish, but as Mr. Topps memorably says in ‘The Apple’: “let’s give it a try”. At the very least it will give me the incentive to maintain more or less weekly updates on this site, which hopefully keeps it from going under completely. So, what kind of movies can you expect in this series? Basically just whatever strikes my fancy. Clearly, I will be focusing on the more obscure films, although I refuse to limit myself to the strictly obscure ones, because I’m not at all interested in obscurity for obscurity’s sake. If a film isn’t falling off the radar in terms of exposure but is in terms of critical understanding, I may find the urge to try to rescue those as well. So, don’t be surprised if you’ll find me poetically waxing about critically snubbed movies like ‘Nine ½ Weeks’, ‘Legally Blonde’ of ‘Pain & Gain’. For, if people cannot even approach the movies they know with a little sensitivity or true openness, how can we expect them to do likewise for their more obscure brethren? Also, I won’t limit myself to just masterpieces in the strictest sense of the word – many movies that will come to pass here may not be perfect or even extraordinary, but at the very least they are all very good movies. But then of course, what exactly constitutes a ‘good’ movie is precisely what I will be discussing in these pieces, because people will only too quickly realize that my idea of ‘good’ can differ quite a bit from their conception. Indeed, it is my expressed intention to blow wide open what I consider a rather narrow view of what is generally considered a ‘good movie’.

So be prepared to expect anything from a silent movie to grisly horror movies and from supposedly run of the mill Hollywood fluff to hardcore porn, because armed with a riff on a great Hank Locklin song I’m going to try to save precisely those pictures that are in danger of falling off the critical radar. So hop on and join me in my new efforts!