The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 4: Getting A Party Started Which Has Already Begun...

I have called it quits. The building of The 46x60 or So Project: Roughly 5000 Films from 1964-Present is over. Well, at least, 99% of it is...

As of today, not counting 2009, which will not be finished until after the awards get announced early next year, from 1964 through 2008, these are the stats:

• Total Films on List: 4966
• Total Films Not on DVD: 1372 (27.62%)
• Total Films on List Seen Since April 2005: 725 (14.59%)
• Total Films Left to See: 2869 (57.77%) 
• Average Films Per Year: 110.35 
• Biggest Year 1964-1969: 1964 - 101 films 
• Biggest Year 1970-1979: 1973 & 1974 - 108 films each 
• Biggest Year 1980-1989: 1987 - 127 films 
• Biggest Year 1990-1999: 1996 - 139 films 
• Biggest Year 2000-2009: 2006 & 2007 - 144 films each

It seems like an awful lot of movies to watch, and it is. But, it is not so out of bounds as you might think.

Here's one way to think about it: Say you are an average person, and that you rent five movies a week from your local Blockhead-Buster. You watch maybe one a night here and there, maybe skipping a night or three, and cramming a couple of films into one night. The renting of the film and the watching of it are a casual habit, something you do to cool off or something you and the wife or the kids do before bed. You don't really notice the pattern you have created; you just do it, almost by rote, sometimes with a yawn. Likewise, you never really think about how these films accumulate. You don't keep lists, and you are on what you believe is an erratic schedule, but the truth is you are averaging just over 250 films a year. 

And, in four years time, without your realizing it, you have watched over 1000 films.

Everyone has seen far more films than they think they have during their lifetime, in the same way that someone (and nearly everyone does) who insists they watch very little television is most likely lying straight through their McDonald's-fattened, hypocritical ass.

Those statistics of mine listed above, and the accomplishment of this seemingly ceaseless climb, are not so impossible. Since I tend to average over 1.5 films a day throughout the year, balancing out my low periods with massive marathons, it will probably take me a lot less time than you would surmise. After all, going by my rule of counting films I have seen up to four years ago (and this rule is basically so I can count more recent films that I have little interest in seeing this soon again), I am nearly at 15% seen already. As of this evening, since September 30th, I have watched 84 films over the past 52 days, just over the average I stated, and most of these films are on my list. Since I started four months ago, I have watched over 50 of the films in each of the years 1964, 1965 and 1966 already (less than 20 to watch in each year too), and I am well on my way there for 1967 as well. Once you get going, and just watch the films, things really get swingin'...

The worrying part of the list is the massive amount of films not on DVD at all. Where they are available online, such as on Crackle, Amazon Video on Demand (where there is nominal rental fee) or IMDb, I will take pains to watch them there. It just amazes me, since many of these are fairly acclaimed and even award-winning or at least nominated films, that they would be so absent from current view. I know it is all about commerce and what will sell, but in this day and age, where Warner Archives has started up what seems like such a noteworthy achievement in locating audiences for more obscure films (where they only commit the film to disc upon your purchase, allowing them to release many films that would normally languish in the vaults), you would think every studio would pick up on this and realize there is some solid money to be made on any film ever released.

Perhaps that is the wave of the near future, but for now, I have Turner Classic Movies at my rescue for many of them. Just tonight, I am being afforded the opportunity to see two of the films on my Not on DVD list within the project, 1964's One Potato, Two Potato and 1970's The Landlord, on TCM. This is where the importance of creating this list truly comes together for me. For many years now, I have led a fairly organic movie existence, doing what I call "The Bounce." Apart from small obsessions with certain lists of films I needed to see, for the most part, I have just let myself be led my own instincts into watching what crossed my path. It could be an article on a historical event that leads me to a filmic portrayal of the situation that leads me to another movie by the same director or star, and then when I am searching for one title I happen upon another that seems interesting, going through TV listings straight down and recording any film that might be worthwhile... etc., etc. Fairly nomadic. No real direction except in seeking out interesting films. It is "The Bounce" though, that partially got me to the point of building this Tower of Film, a need to focus on something that could potentially teach me more than the way I had been proceeding. And yet, I can still use the form of "The Bounce" to aid me in seeking out the films missing on disc. Which is how I noticed One Potato, Two Potato, which led me next to The Landlord tonight. 

The ultimate point is that I now that focus. I have, in the course of the past four months of intimacy with the list, so memorized its contents that I can see any list of films and tell you with about 80% certainty whether I need to see the film or not. And the list will not end. For as long as I am working on going through it, I am going to add to it. As I said much earlier in this ongoing piece, I might decide to add films from other festivals to it at some point. I might find another book or list with some other interesting films that I will wish to attach to the project. And, of course, as I am progressing, each new year will have to be appended. 2009 will add another 120 films or so to the project alone, and it is not out of sight to believe it could approach 6000 films before I am done.

You see, that is where I am now, deep in the throes of movie ecstasy, seeing every film released throughout my lifetime that I have ignored, not heard of, or just mocked without ever having any real knowledge about it. I will see The Last Detail at last, and I will be able to converse freely and truthfully about it. I am absolutely committed to seeing myself reach the summit of this Tower of Film ultimately.

If I stay alive, that is...

-FIN-

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 3: Things Start to Get a Little Wonky...

With my Tower of Film already swaying haphazardly in the skies above me, I was beginning to consider whether it was simply time to concentrate on watching the movies and writing about the experience of doing so.

But, there were still three crucial elements missing...

First, there were my DVDs. The thrust for the notion of adding my own collection from 1964 forward to the list was that, while a certain portion of films already entered into the 46x60 or So Project were also sitting on my shelves, there were a great many discs that I had purchased over the last couple of years of which I had yet to pause for a viewing. Since watching every available film in the project would allow me little time (or much in the way of interest) for watching films outside of it, the solution was to add every single film in my personal catalogue. Not only did this increase each year, on the average, by eight to twelve more films, cushioning the Project a tad more, but it would essentially force me to finally catch up on watching everything I owned.

It also led to the addition of the second crucial, missing element -- horror and science-fiction films -- to the list. Since I tend to purchase most of the films which I adore (or at least halfway like) in those genres, and since horror and science-fiction is largely ignored by the Academy except in the makeup and effects categories, this allowed me to "slum up" the list a little bit. I have to admit, it was looking awfully prestigious in there. I know the original point was to actually watch all of these films of presumed prestige which I had ignored much of my life. But, after the first couple of months of plowing through endless dramas from 1964 through 1966, one after the other, with very few comedies to break up the bluster and whining, adding my own personal faves, no matter the genre, threw a bit of a fun factor into the mix.

And this led to the purpose of the third crucial, missing element: slumming it up even more. Any overview of a cinematic yearbook is not complete without also seeing the nadir of cinematic "achievement" throughout those twelve months. Sure, the Academy is pretty good at allowing some truly egregious films get nominated, but not really as much as you would think (or snarkily wish). That's where the Golden Turkey Awards, and its one-time competitor and now leader in the field of film insult, the Golden Raspberries come into the picture. As much as I despise Michael Medved's politics and cultural whining, and as much as I don't agree with the purposes behind why he and his brother Harry included certain films within the pages of their series of books in the late '70s and early '80s about epically bad movies, I will admit that I return to them time and again to catch up on the wacky antics of directors gone loco. And overall, since they saw fit to have their readers also vote on the worst films in history, this provided a pretty solid base of rottenness on which to build.

Pretty much where the Golden Turkeys and the Medveds left off (they do overlap a few years) is where the Golden Raspberries began embracing movie horridness and took it to an even more thorough finger-pointing level, handing out their annual awards to major time- and brain-wasters to this day. (Myself, I am about one month away from joining their society myself, so I too can vote on the awards, something the Oscars don't allow. Their loss. Oh yeah, and I could attend the ceremony, as well.)

Thus, I took to the task of adding all of the nominated films for both awful movie award programs to my Tower of Film. (Granted, most of the films will be kept in the basement of the Tower, but this is pending further review. After all, I can't criticize a film without seeing it first.) It only took a couple of nights to add every single allegedly terrible movie to my list (after all, I have not seen all of them, just many of them). When completed, unloading a couple barrels of genuine trash balanced out the 46x60 or So Project so nicely, that I was finally ready to allow the contractors building the Tower of Film to go home and see their families after a long four months of construction.

And since I am actually each and every one of those "contractors," it's sad I didn't work out a decent overtime plan.

[To be concluded in Pt. 4 tomorrow...]

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 2: It's a Tower Built to the Heavens. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The foundation was built, and it seemed like a decent enough place already to just skip building the new couple of floors, planting an aerial, and calling it a home. The list had already taken me about a month to create, and in my excitement, I had already started watching films in earnest. The first film I watched under the sway of this fresh delirium was 1965's Sean Connery army prison flick, The Hill, directed in truly brutal fashion by Sidney Lumet. If I had started going through the multitude of films on my list by encountering a true dud (and not one where I went in expecting vileness), I may have given up the entire project then and there. But The Hill so captured my attention that I knew straight off I had made the right choice.

But, the list itself did not seem robust enough to me. There were still films that I loved missing from the list, and films I had always wanted to see which were not appearing yet. I began to think about what was influential in the mid-60s. in the dawning of my youth, and it didn't take me long to figure out where to find a major dose of relief: the Cannes Film Festival. Yeah, yeah, ugly Americans, hate the French all you want. Myself, I don't hate them, not even for easy comedic stereotyping. I love watching their films (equally as much as I love watching films from all over the world), and I love how purely they (as a nation) used to commit themselves to cinema. And yes, there are other major film festivals out there from which I could have chosen to cull more choices for my Tower of Film, but how many are as famous or as influential for such a long time as Cannes? Unlike most other festivals, except perhaps Sundance, Cannes still makes the news every single year, perhaps more now for the antics that take place there more and more than for actual film presentation. But, Cannes still looms large in the international cultural atmosphere. And, speaking solely of a certain period in time, how can one such as I deny its mix of foreign releases from nearly every corner of the world?

It was a natural for me, and so I started adding Cannes years to the list. This took far longer than I had anticipated, considering that I tend to format as I go along and I wanted things to be as perfect as possible. (Again, that possible OCD kicking in...) Cannes added a huge amount to each year, sometimes 30-40 more films, sometimes even more. I didn't take just "in competition" films, but outside award winners, "out of competition" films, and all of the films in the multitude of Cannes' special categories of which they seem to be so fond. The list truly began to bulge to elephantine proportions, and I actually did start to worry about whether I would be able to see even half of these films in my lifetime. (More on that later...)

While I was zipping through each year of Cannes, I started another side project: queuing all of the available films up on Netflix, or marking whether I owned the films or had already seen them. Because I wanted the list to remain fresh, I had to decide on a cut-off date for where I would consider my current critical decree valid to the purposes of the list. I decided to choose the moment of my arrival from Alaska into California, which was when I started writing, reconsidering my film philosophy, and critiquing full-time: April 2005.

Any film that I had seen since that date and of which I still had decent recall could be marked as "SEEN" on the list, unless I truly wished to watch it again even in the midst of thousands of other films. (Surprisingly, in many cases, I chose to go this route, if only because it would probably be a while until I encountered them as I went through the list.) This enabled me to check off many of the films I had seen in the past four years, even in the last six months. (I chose to make the current year more of a checklist of everything I had seen within 2009, to keep it fresh and because we won't know the Oscar nominees for a couple of months yet.)

However, as I went through Netflix, looking up every single film, I ran into far more films turning out to be unavailable than I thought. Some of the missing films weren't just relative obscurities either, but Oscar nominees, and occasionally, an actual Oscar winner. And by adding the Cannes lists, largely composed of films of foreign extract (most, but not all, more popular Hollywood films tend to get shown out of competition, if they showed up at all), the problem got even worse, with each year's list (now grown to around 60-75 films per year) ending up with a range between 20-25 films per year unavailable. Not just unavailable on Netflix (which is actually surprisingly robust in its catalogue), but not even for purchase on Amazon. With so many of the foreign films not even available in their home countries, I realized that I needed to rethink my goals in this endeavor, as it was becoming very clear that a solid quarter of my ultimate list would be unattainable towards the completion of my new project.

[To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 3: Things Start to Get a Little Wonky...]

The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 1: Building a Tower of Film...

I wanted focus, but the question was, "Focus on what?" I began to try and work out exactly where to begin reeducating myself in the film history of my lifetime. Do I start with a certain director and watch all of his available films straight through? It sounded good, but then I was likely to lapse into a state of cinematic paralyzation if I restricted myself to just one style without interruption, and how would I determine the best place to force an interruption if needed? How would I fit those moments into the plan? The same went for choosing one genre outside of my normal path and focusing on the landmark films within that genre. Except who was to establish what I should see within that genre? I considered focusing on stars, cinematographers with whom I have grown enamored and wished to see more of their work, even something as goofy as choosing a random key grip and then watching any film in which they were involved.

But, then it struck me... Considering my concerns regarding The Last Detail and its until-thus-far unseen ilk, it dawned on me that most of the films of which I claimed knowledge (when in fact I didn't beyond what I had read fleetingly) were released within the span of years in which I have been alive, from 1964 to the present. (Yes, I have established my age, but then that has never been a problem with me, as I always feel as if I am 22. Only an increasingly creakier 22...) What if I were to focus on watching the major films, foreign and domestic, that have been released within my lifetime? 

The reasons are three-fold. One, most of the films on which people would confront me would be of more recent vintage, so this would be a great way to capture that knowledge and be ahead of the game, or point me towards films to include in my "to-see" list when I ran into someone who mentioned something I hadn't watched. Two, it would allow me to flit about through most of the major directors and styles throughout my lifetime, without allowing myself to fall into a state of that dreaded boredom, for too long at least. Thirdly, and I was hoping most interestingly, it would allow to actually gain a large dose of cultural and political knowledge by watching films through the '60s, '70s and '80s, and perhaps increase my understanding of the shifting tides of both the American and world consciousness through these decades. (There was also a fourth, smaller reason, that didn't strike me until much later. This was seeing the evolution of the movies themselves through five decades of development, turmoil, and changing technology.)

So, I knew why, but now: what? How to determine which films to watch. The first step was easy: the Oscars. I do not believe that there is ever actually a "Best Picture" in any given year. Styles are so diverse, as are intents, and who is to ever say that a supposedly moving drama about love and loss during wartime is any more meaningful than a mere comedy that seeks to bring nothing but laughter and smiles to people's faces? That's right: simple escape is just as important. I often deride it, or at least those who only go that route, but the use of the movies as mere escape is actually quite important. It is a release for emotions and pent-up frustrations that can prove very necessary to society. Thus, I needed to build a list that gave me a fairly accurate picture of each movie year. The Academy Awards are critiqued by the masses as being not populist enough, and on the other hand, by much of the film community, as being too populist. The Oscars really cannot win in the long run. They just have to endure, and prove themselves enough of a mark of excellence to thrive.

I may not agree most of the time with the Oscar choices, but I do know that it would prove enough of a mix of the high and low to begin building my list using all of the nominees and winners for all categories from films released in 1964 forward. I created an Excel database and begin to construct my Tower of Film. At first, each year ended up working out to about 25-35 films or so, which is what I began calling the project, added a 44 at the front, representing the number of full years of my lifetime to that point. (I changed it to 46 for now, for while I have just turned the corner on 45, I am actually in my 46th year of existence. The title will remain so for a good while though. I am reluctant to change it past this point of establishment, if only out of exhaustion.)

Completing the Oscar list left me delighted with the structure of the thing -- each year neatly blocked off, films alphabetized within each year, and columns for each category, the winners in yellow -- but desperately seeking major films which I had known to have come out in a particular year, but were not to be found within their block. What to do? How to add films without making this list more personally oriented, and not neutrally enriching?

The trick was to turn it personally towards someone else: Danny Peary. Mr. Peary had written a volume in the early '90s (on which I have written before) called Alternate Oscars, which is basically his version of how each Best Picture, Actor and Actress award should have been handled from the beginning of the awards in 1927 through the year of the book's devising, 1992. Peary makes numerous interesting and brave choices, such as the great Karloff getting a Best Actor achievement for his astounding role in Val Lewton's production of The Body Snatcher in 1945. (It is a favorite of mine as well, and I agree, Karloff is exceptional in the film.) Like the Oscars, no one will ever agree with all of Peary's choices (even I don't), and many of them are based on whether he had already rewarded a certain party with an award either farther up and down the line, so it plays heavily on second and even third sight. Alternate Oscars is armchair critiquing at its top-notch best.

And so I went through his book beginning in 1964 and adding in any films not touched or dismissed by the Academy the first time around. This began to flesh out the list a tad more, but it really only added, at most, three or four films per year, if any at all. Scanning my own collection, I began to realize that what the Oscar (and Peary's list) was missing was a foreign influence. Apart from the Best Foreign Film category and the odd stray nomination elsewhere, foreign films were barely represented, with many prominent directors of my lifetime missing wholesale from the list. Since it was a few Criterion Collection discs that caused me to muse on this aspect, I decided to grab the entire Criterion list of releases, queue it up by year, and then add all of those releases from 1964 on up. This made the list bulge out a bit more, sometimes as many as seven, eight or ten films per year, though there was naturally a major drop-off from the mid-'80s to now, seeing as the company really concentrates on older films, with only a few more modern releases in the mix. I was also aware of the European version of Criterion, Masters of Cinema, and though some films were matched on both lists, it did a handful more films of great interest to me, some not released on Region 1 discs at all. (I would eventually purchase a couple of Masters of Cinema discs at Scarecrow Video in Seattle in late July. Region 2, yes, but they will play on my laptop.)

So, I now had a good fifty or so movies per year on my list, and it was looking like it might top out at around 2000 films. But it wasn't enough for me...

(To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 2: It's a Tower Built to the Heavens. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?)

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 4: The Facts, Ma'am... (Maybe the Facts)

On the Internet Movie Database, which most of us simply refer to as IMDb (small "b", thank you) and which has largely taken on a generally accepted position as the main online resource for instant movie information, I have (to this date) rated around 5,000 movies.

Let's get this straight from this point on: I know that I am not a complete poser. Despite what happened with The Last Detail and those other films, I am very certain of my love for the movies. It's like asking if I wish to continue breathing. And I have actually seen all of the films that I have rated on IMDb. I may not have seen some of those films for over twenty years or more, but I have seen them. The difference, though, is that I actually care and consider what I am rating on the site. 

Fully aware that the way I felt about certain films in my teens, twenties and even early thirties may not be the way I feel about those films now (and even considering the fact that I might have nothing left of the memory of the seeing of a certain film except for my love, hate or boredom with it at the time), I have taken great pains in recent months to amend these ratings to fit my current state, but only by freshly viewing the films in question. While it is not of any importance to any other person but myself, it is the way that I have to tackle things to keep my sense of critical opinion as pure as I can, given the fact that I am as deficient and as prone to posturing and wrongheadedness as anybody else.

The one constant in my life of misspent youth, careless education, menial employment, and suffocated relationships has been my love of movies. The movie theatre has always proven to be the only acceptable form of a "church" to me. I don't require religion in my life, but it doesn't mean that I didn't spend a certain portion of my teens trying to figure out where I fit into the system in which everyone else was so willing to switch to lock-step every Sunday to enter. Combine my youthful wandering with my early love for movies, and is it any wonder that the only times that any socially accepted church really reached me in any way was when I took in various viewings of The Cross and the Switchblade and The Greatest Story Ever Told inside churches? (OK, it was also to make out with girls in the church pews. Hardly watched the films in two instances...)

And so it has gone. It doesn't really matter where the experience takes place, though I prefer a legitimate theatre. The flicker of the movie image, the darkness of the room, the comfort (or charming discomfort) of the seats, the smell of popcorn, the shared community... all of the standard cliches of why one loves going to movies also apply to me -- call it my one true moment of conformity -- and there is nothing for me to trade for the experience. I long to see movies everywhere, in any setting. Anywhere Sam-I-Am would not eat green eggs and ham is where I would watch a movie. Even on a vacation that has been solely designed for me to partake of an area's distinct pleasures, my first thought is of seeing a movie at some point while I am there. The movie theatre is where I always long to be, and for this statement, there can be no pose. It is where I meditate. It is where I can truly think through problems. It is where I need to be. It is where I am truly me.

Perhaps you see my movie adoration as too romantic. Well, if I must prove romantic in some small measure, then this is it. Personally, I view this stance as more theological, maybe even personally political. Regardless, what I know is that I am a movie fan. Of that, I can be certain, and my motto of "Any film, any time" is also a true statement, at least to the degree that I can follow through on it by financial means and via my ability to reach the location in question at the proposed time.

But, if I know who I am, why did I get all flustered over my reaction to not having seen The Last Detail (and those other films)? If I just kept to my occasional pose in those situations, aren't I the only one to know of my infrequent deception?

That is precisely the problem: for most of my life, I have simply been deceiving myself. Maybe even all the time.

Worse, to a large degree, I have drowned myself in sewage, and never really taken advantage of the full breadth that the cinematic world can offer me. I have resigned myself to the film ghettoes for so long, that I have forgotten how wide-ranging and interesting the total film experience can be. See only wide-release films, and you will only have a wide-release history and knowledge of movies. Keep to watching only slasher movies, and your ability to dissect films of deeper intent with the same casual ease of a killer's butcher knife through a victim's flesh will be met only with struggle and the eventual rending of true understanding. It's the equivalent of only keeping to beach reading, but never approaching the literary canon. While I have made exposed myself to and studied films throughout my life, it has only been through the keeping of company with very particular directors: Hitchcock, Lang, Kurosawa, Powell and Pressburger, Welles... But there are so many more worthy of deeper study and appreciation, beyond seeing one of their films and calling myself done. There is a broader, film education waiting out there for me, of which I thus far largely chosen to neglect myself. The first step is to watch the films. The second is to understand them.

I have friends who only go to the movies to do what they term as "escape," an overused term, to be sure, but it is the way I have heard it phrased. Get off work, "need to not think for a while," go to any stupid film that weekend... that is the relationship that the bulk of people have with the movies. It is a night out with friends, a wife, a date, a lover... nothing more. Dinner, a movie, and then... come what may... return again next weekend unblinkingly and machine-like to the next wide-release movie...

I, too, have walked the path of shared ritual as regards the movie experience. I love going to new movies, too, but I never call it escape. Never. I cannot shut off the brain, even when watching Friday the 13th, Part Eleventy-Thousand: Jason Gets A Hysterectomy. (Believe me, they will find a way...) My need to not simply watch, but to ascertain and critique, extends to my home movie ritual, where the DVD player almost never seems to stop whirring. And lately, whirring non-stop without any true focus.

And it this inability to simply watch a bunch of dopey After Dark horror films (in the same manner that I just fervently watched thirteen dopey horror films over the Halloween weekend) and discovering nothing but ennui over the idea of continuing through the series, combined with my anger over the collected lies of my reactions to simple conversational movie repartee, which led me to moment a few months ago for which metaphors concerning holes and digging were created. This point in time saw me finally get a grip on all of these issues, and brought about the establishment of "The 46x60 or So" project, involving the creation of a massive (and ever-growing) list, and a new sense of purpose guiding me through the movie landscape.

[To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 1: Building a Tower of Film...]

A Brief Interlude Concerning the Most Recent Halloween

Sure, a couple of days ago, I wrote about the theory that I might not actually be a horror fan anymore. For those watching me struggle with self-doubt here this week, please remember that this is all building to something. A point, if you must have a more definite term. It is really about a refocusing of purpose on my part, on shifting my attentions to a larger, more educational goal for myself regarding film.

It has never really been about whether or not I actually like horror films anymore, because I do. It is hard to enter the Halloween weekend and not watch monster movies when one has the collection of films that I do. In fact, this weekend, I ended up zipping through thirteen of the little buggers, mainly because I purposefully kept Halloween small, private and at home this year.

Not that I didn't make an attempt to make it broader and more public. I bought a pumpkin well over four weeks ago, but as of tonight, it is still sitting in the center of our dining table, uncarved and merely autumnal. (Pumpkins will last for a good while when not laid into and gutted with a knife.) Jen and I tried to hit the Disney Halloween fireworks on Wednesday (our only night to afford this opportunity to the both of us this week), but they were cancelled due to the winds. Likewise, our attempt to hit the Haunted Mansion was blocked by a two-hour waiting line. (I had tried to ride the Halloween refit of Space Mountain a few weeks back, but the ride kept breaking down, thus forcing Jen's brother Ben and myself out of line until we got sick of waiting. We did hit the Mansion then, though.)

I bought candy, but for the first time since I moved here, there were no trick-and-treaters mucking about last night. Not a single knock on either our door or any doors adjacent to us. Not a single bark out of our girls, who usually go crazy during Halloween (and love greeting the various monsters, superheroes and princesses that arrive at our door). And without any parties to attend, it is a perfectly quiet and DVD-laden weekend for me. I dug in early on Saturday (I wake up at 5 a.m., regardless of the day), and started in on the stack of films I had put together for the event.

For those who care about such things (like myself), this is the list of nine films I went through on Saturday. You might notice that there are numerous films from 1964 and 1965 on the full list of films from this weekend, over half of them in fact. The reasons for this will become obvious in a few days as I elaborate more on my current theme:

1. Zaat (1975/1972) Dir.: Don Barton // Cinema 4 rating: 3 // TCM Underground
2. Swamp Thing (1982) Dir.: Wes Craven // Cinema 4 rating: 4 // TCM Underground
3. The Last Man on Earth (1964) Dir.: Sidney Salkow // Cinema 4 rating: 5 // DVD
4. Planet of the Vampires [Terrore nello spazio] (1965) Dir.: Mario Bava // Cinema 4 rating: 7 // DVD
5. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) Dir.: Daniel Haller // Cinema 4 rating: 4 // DVD
6. Nightmare (1964) Dir.: Freddie Francis // Cinema 4 rating: 6 // DVD
7. The Tomb of Ligeia (1965) Dir.: Roger Corman // Cinema 4 rating: 7 // DVD
8. Murders in the Zoo (1933) Dir.: A. Edward Sutherland // Cinema 4 rating: 6 // TCM
9. Circus of Horrors (1960) Dir.: Sidney Hayers // Cinema 4 rating: 6 // TCM

And here are the films I watched today on this "hair of the dog" post-Halloween, "extra hour of sleep" Sunday:

10. Midnight Movie (2008) Dir.: Jack Messitt // Cinema 4 rating: 4 // Showtime
11. Killer Movie (2008) Dir: Jeff Fisher // Cinema 4 rating: 5 // Showtime
12. The Skull (1965) Dir.: Freddie Francis // Cinema 4 rating: 6 // DVD
13. War Gods of the Deep (aka City Under the Sea) (1965) Dir.: Jacques Tourneur // Cinema 4 rating: 4 // DVD

Sheesh! All this, and I also managed to watch two World Series games, the first game of the MLS Playoff pairing between the Los Angeles Galaxy and CD Chivas USA (the second game of which I will be attending live next Sunday), keep half an eye on the Vikings-Packers game, watched the new episodes of Dexter and Californication (Jen doesn't watch these shows, so I was able to rip through them tonight -- Mad Men, however, will have to wait until Tuesday), reread half of David Skal's horror cultural history "The Monster Show," and wrote just under 5,000 words.

And yet, I still couldn't find time to carve that pumpkin. Must be slacking off in my halfway-to-dotage.

Hope you all had a monstrous Halloween as well.