“Film lovers are sick people.” -François Truffaut

Let me be the first to welcome you to Dim the House Lights, a new film criticism blog run by a couple of guys who live on opposite ends of the North American East Coast. My name is Derek Godin, and I’ll be dispatching from the frozen netherworld of Montreal, Quebec. My partner in crime in this endeavor is my good friend Juan Barquin, who is based on the muggy banks of Miami, Florida.

When Juan and I first discussed trying to get this site off the ground, one question kept dogging me. “Does the Internet really need another blog where two guys talk about their movie opinions?” And if I’m being completely honest with myself, the answer is, in all likelihood, no. Every blogging platform out there is choked with blogs like this one, where film buffs take a crack at longish-form criticism with varying degrees of success. A lot, if not most, are updated infrequently at best. I know I’ve got my own small personal graveyard of movie blogs, longform or otherwise.

So how is Dim the House Lights a different venture? Well, firstly and most importantly, we’re two running this operation. That may sound insignificant, but there’s no way you can be your own editor in the long run. You need someone to be a prick about deadlines, and to goad you into writing when entries start getting sporadic. It’s basically a buddy system, but for writers. Secondly, we’re fans of the medium. This is nothing special, because any film writer worth their salt at least likes movies. If it’s readily available and in focus, we’ll probably watch it. High-brow, low-brow, you name it, we’re on it. We don’t believe limiting ourselves with regard to genre, era, or location. Movies are movies are movies.

What we plan to cover here at DtHL is a mixture of new releases, both theatrical and home video, and older movies we happen to see. There will be an editorial section where we talk about things outside the purview of a single film, and a section called Double Vision, in which we talk about things we have diverging opinions on. We will likely have lists and guest features and other assorted goodies, but the content will mostly be Juan and I (and sometimes other people) talking about the movies we see, new or otherwise, a few paragraphs at a time. We will strive to engage with the material and play connect-the-dots with films and their respective contexts, and attempt to write as thoughtfully as we possibly can. This is an art form we love, and we hope that love shines through in our work. That is our modest goal.

We hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Cheers,
Derek Godin
Co-editor

P.S. A special shout-out to meysell quintana for coding the website. A million thanks to him for his work in helping us launch.