I had quite a different idea of how I'd be celebrating the site's six month mark. Instead movie chat has been rendered completely trivial by the devasting forces of last week's hurricane. I debated whether I should put off posting the monthly overview til next week, instead dedicating the site to the relief efforts and how you can help.

Can't talk long because SIRI and this Drupal shite have conspired against a longer entry, and I'm reduced to a hinky iPhone for access to my little slice of the Internet. So I'm posting two important statements. The first is please, if you haven't already, volunteer whether locally or larger. I wish I could post a list of phone #'s and websites to click, but I'm a cellular Luddite at the moment. Please Google according to your charitable needs.

First a late beaking Halloween Horror addition! The Film Society of Lincoln Center, known for having its act firmly together, has announced just in time to potentially miss every screening its Fright Flick sked for the holiday! This Saturday the 27th of October FSLC offers THE NIGHT OF THE DEVILS at 6pm, and at triple the time tells the same story Mario Bava covered in 35 minutes a decade earlier in BLACK SABBATH. Nothing wrong with being a little late to the party, sez moi.

Ah, Halloween, you nasty character indeed! How you are adored by the Cinegeek. How you remind us in your greatest cinematic iterations of the worst cowerings of our childhoods, indeed of even the childhood of human civilization, littered about a campfire captivated and traumatized simultaneously by the doings and wrongdoings of any era's particular boogeyman, whose ability to poke at our worst fears was ultimately the job of the chronicler of said ghastly grostesque.

Much to choose from today you lucky lucky Cinegeek you! Midnight screenings from Kubrick and Raimi to get you in the Halloween mood. A Ford western that perhaps trumped all of his other frontier-taming efforts.

Yes, the Film Forum concludes its concurrent week-long run of two different masterpieces, David Lean's first assertion of style unique to himself BRIEF ENCOUNTER, and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, whose only description warranted resides in its title. Plus it's in 3D! Yes, John Ford's influential and nearly unequivocal masterpiece THE SEARCHERS screens today as part of MOMA's Ride, Boldly Ride series, and one should never get tired of viewing this late-innings masterpiece from a man who did so much to invent the very language of film as we know it.

British heartbreak is oh so mannered, oh so cruel, and oh so bloody inconvenient, and my Pick Of The Day may just be the final word on that Trifecta of English romance personified.

Amongst the delights cinematic on the big screen this fine October day (which is a stretch) you may find King Vidor's American pioneer epic and early Technicolor classic NORTHWEST PASSAGE at MOMA, the little known and rarely screened silent gem THE ANCIENT LAW at BAM with live musical accompaniment by multimedia artist Thomas Koner, and a pair of 70's

HARD choices today, as Nitehawk Cinema kicks the day's doings off with a noon screening of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, Film Forum presents silent comedy master Harold Lloyd in THE FRESHMAN, BAM sates our Hitchcock thirst with a 35mm unspooling of

Let's talk about the Megaflop, that narrow film niche of budgets gargantuan, productions troubled, and box office results DefCon 5 for the studios that produced them. And this is a love letter, mind you.