Spooktober Recap and No-Theme November and Onwards

Images of the ASL for “no” taken without permission from Lifeprint.com, which is full of lessons on learning other signs as part of its ASLU tutorials.

I had a lot of fun this year trying to keep up with the Spooktober theme, even if I couldn’t commit to doing a new entry every day like the truly hard-core can.

There were a surprising number of hits this month, surprising because I didn’t have any agenda beyond “what looks spooky and what am I in the mood for right now?” I think the most fun I had was with Freaky, while I think the “best” movies I saw for the month were Under the Skin and The Witch.

It’s been enjoyable enough that I wanted to keep the ball rolling with a new theme every month, but nothing’s really calling out to me for November. I considered:

No-vember: movies with “No” or “On” in the title, which would let me finally watch Magnolia and also conveniently include today’s movie Bugonia

No-shave November: Every month is no-shave month for me, so I can’t really participate in the real-life version, but I could potentially watch movies with lead characters with beards or mustaches (for Movember). That would also allow for Bugonia, more or less, and let me get caught up on Dune 2 and Furiosa. But the down side is that that’s a dumb idea.

Noir-vember: I just heard about this one. The problem is that I took cinema studies in school and also tagged along with the Grim Fandango team on all the “research” trips they took to the theater, so I’ve seen all the noir movies I’m interested in.

No-theme November: What even is that. We’re trying to build a society here.

Although I like the idea of getting into Halloween season, I think I have to admit that the most fun of Spooktober for me has been:

Making headway through the backlog of movies I’ve always meant to watch, but never made the time for

Feeling extremely clever and pleased with myself for coming up with a title for each post

Which is something I can do year-round, honestly. Also I love starting up new categories for this here blog. (And then abandoning them within a month or two).

So I’m keeping “One Thing I Like” for new stuff I’m watching, in an attempt to keep myself focused, instead of indulging in multi-thousand-word essays that try to sum up everything the movie already says more effectively. And then I’ll also resolve to watch at least one movie a month that’s been hanging out neglected on my to-watch list, as part of “Backlog Zero.” That’ll let me indulge the part of myself that loves writing dad jokes in blog post titles. (i.e. the entirety of myself).