The Merits of Quitting
Every time Halloween rolls around, I have a problem. See, I like some of the Halloween trappings, and Gothic tales (Crimson Peak!), but I’m a wuss when it comes to horror, whether gory or psychological. Finding movies to watch that fall in the sweet spot? Almost impossible. Especially because my spouse and I have developed a bad(?) habit of quitting. See, when we met, he was a Film Studies major and I was an English major and film buff. We’ve seen a looot of movies together. We’re also both storytellers, so what we generally do is watch a movie and then dissect it. By now, we’re having trouble finding movies that engage us. It doesn’t help that we prefer science fiction and fantasy, which is currently dominated by the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and we grew tired of that several phases ago. So looking for spooky seasonal enjoyment, we tried: We didn’t last longer than 15 minutes with any of them. And it’s not a matter of attention span — we both read novels still. It’s just…have we seen too many movies in our lifetime? Has all that dissecting meant that we can spot the lines of the Matrix from a mile away and can’t blur them back into an entertaining tale? Every once in a while, we happen on something we enjoy enough to watch to the end. (And then still dissect, because it’s fun.) It doesn’t have to be a “perfect” film, whatever that means. It just has…