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Halloween is today and although I won't be dressing up this year, I did don garb for the first time as an adult last year and it went amazingly. I went out on the town to a famed Portland haunt, The Shanghai Tunnel, dressed as Waldo. I can be far from outgoing at times, but a) I was in the right state of mind, and b) I had a female companion who was dressed as a "decoy" (i.e. one of the non-Waldo lookalikes meant to distract and fool the Waldo hunters), so it all felt very much like a performance art piece. I was even able to endure the repeated loud drunken cries of "Dude! I found you! I found you!" because it meant that my outfit was instantly recognizable and I wouldn't be forced to explain myself ad nauseam

This year my girlfriend and I are going on a tour of a historic cemetery where actors embodying the "untimely departed" will relate stories behind some of the more notable deaths and notorious deceased. It strikes me as being fairly a hoot. It also puts me in the mood for scary sequels. This being the witching season, this week I have chosen to share some appropriately themed Chapter Twos to a pair of lesser-known horror sequels. Although to be honest, neither of them is really a horror film. Whether this will dilute your enjoyment or not I can't say, but both are worth seeking out, particularly as one of them is on my list of all-time beloved films. But first - you knew it was coming - a slight detour must be hazarded.

Not that you asked (then again, maybe you did?) but sequels are far from the only films that I watch. It's true, they now take up the lion's share of my time - cinematically speaking - but this has not always been the case. I feel that I have shared enough of myself in the past six months that the time has now come to broach that question that dwells above all other queries for a cinephile: what are your favorite movies?

I have always maintained that first and foremost, a film should be entertaining. I enjoy critiquing a film, dissecting it and discussing it, especially in order to determine why I reacted to it the way I did. I would never get any enjoyment out of blathering on in a scholarly or knowledgeable way about a film that I loathed. I feel those types who can adopt that pose belong in a partitioned-off area on one of the levels of Dante's rings of Hell. A film may have great intentions, weighty subject matter, a fine pedigree, and excellent technical credits but if it doesn't come together into something involving, it's all for naught.

This is where I must offer the caveat that for me the spectrum that encompasses the word "entertainment" is a vast and far-flung enterprise. Case in point: the opening shot of Bruno Dumont's emotionally grueling and deliberately paced provocation L'Humanite, from 2002. The camera observes a tiny figure in the distance as it begins running across the top of a hill. If you were to guess that the camera holds that shot for the two minutes or so it takes for the character to cross from one edge of the frame to the other, you either know your French cinema or you have masochistic tendencies. I love long tracking shots and static shots alike and from that moment I was as entranced as I was by the floating feather at the beginning of Forrest Gump.

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