Clearing out my backlog

BacklogListMovies
Written By Alex Thompson

Peeping Tom

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a physical media backlog. You tend to buy movies more than you watch them, and your shelves are around 50/50 between movies you own and have watched and those you own but have not watched. So you’ve decided you should clean out your backlog.

Maybe you’re really, really like me and completed a move just under a year ago and haven’t unpacked some of your physical media because you don’t have somewhere to put it. So when you take the first step of cataloging your collection, specifically those you haven’t seen yet, you’ve combined a similar older list with new entries from the few boxes you have unpacked so far. And of course you’ve kept buying new movies you haven’t seen, whether they are things you’ve always meant to check out that have gotten good Criterion editions, like Peeping Tom, or part of a big horror box set, like the later Chucky movies.

And if you’re really really really like me, you’re about a year out of your Ph.D. program and haven’t written anything longer than a paragraph for fun in that time. Your Ph.D. advisor kept kindly but insistently telling you that your writing was more blog-like than strictly academic (a charge you took more as a compliment than a critique, though you understood and changed what you was doing to fit the genre conventions). The prior installation of this project did the kind of kickstarting you want this version to do, so you decide to pick it up again. Maybe you’ll start writing longer, non-review entries alongside the shorter reviews. Who knows!

Okja

The list, continuously updated, can be found on my Letterboxd page. I will also keep track of it here with links to completed reviews when I write them. And I’ll keep adding in movies as I unpack them.

The List

  • Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell

  • Shadows

  • Faces

  • The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

  • Opening Night

  • Lola

  • Bay of Angels

  • Donkey Skin

  • A Room in Town

  • Parade

  • Trafic

  • Jour de Fête

  • Aparajito

  • Apur Sansar

  • Che

  • Three Colors: Red

  • Three Colors: White

  • 8 1/2

  • A Brighter Summer Day

  • Chimes at Midnight

  • Close-Up

  • Dreams

  • Gates of Heaven

  • Vernon, Florida

  • Make Way for Tomorrow

  • The Magician

  • Safety Last

  • Phantom of the Opera

  • 1941

  • Always

  • Even Dwarves Started Small

  • Land of Silence and Darkness

  • Fata Morgana

  • The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

  • Heart of Glass

  • Stroszek

  • Woyzeck

  • Fitzcarraldo

  • Ballad of the Little Soldier

  • Where the Green Ants Dream

  • Cobra Verde

  • Lessons of Darkness

  • Little Dieter Needs to Fly

  • My Best Fiend

  • Grand Hotel

  • Mutiny on the Bounty

  • Mrs. Miniver

  • Gigi

  • Ben-Hur

  • How the West Was Won

  • Doctor Zhivago

  • Cool Hand Luke

  • Bullitt

  • Dirty Harry

  • Chariots of Fire

  • The Color Purple

  • The Bodyguard

  • Million Dollar Baby

  • The Animatrix

  • A Star is Born

  • Alexander

  • It’s Such a Beautiful Day

  • The Lives of Others

  • Yojimbo

  • Sanjuro

  • King of the Hill

  • Monsieur Verdoux

  • A Man Escaped

  • I, Daniel Blake

  • The Confession

  • In  Which We Serve

  • This Happy Breed

  • Blithe Spirit

  • Breaker Morant

  • Blow Out

  • Out 1

  • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

  • Lady Vengeance

  • The Damned

  • The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll

  • The Old Dark House

  • Cash on Demand

  • The Snorkel

  • Maniac

  • Never Take Sweets from a Stranger

  • Taste of Fear

  • The Stranglers of Bombay

  • The Terror of the Tonga

  • The Pirates of Blood River

  • Sword of Sherwood Forest

  • The Camp on Blood Island

  • Yesterday’s Enemy

  • Creatures the World Forgot

  • Alison’s Birthday

  • Anchored

  • Celia

  • Clearcut

  • Dark Waters

  • The Demon

  • The Dreaming

  • Eyes of Fire

  • Kadaicha

  • Lake of the Dead

  • Leptirica

  • Lokis

  • Penda’s Fen

  • Robin Redbreast

  • Tilbury

  • She-Wolf

  • Witchhammer

  • Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched

  • The Pit and the Pendulum

  • The Haunted Palace

  • House of Usher

  • Witchfinder General

  • Hands

  • Anatomy of a Murder

  • Oliver!

  • To Live and Die in LA

  • The Last Waltz

  • The Heroic Trio

  • Heroic Trio 2: Executioners

  • The Outsiders

  • Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

  • Body Double

  • The Deer Hunter

  • Muriel, or the Time of Return

  • L’Avventura

  • Macbeth

  • Kagemusha

  • The Leopard

  • History is Made at Night

  • After Hours

  • Okja

  • Night Creature

  • Paranoiac

  • Nightmare

  • Child’s Play 3

  • Bride of Chucky

  • Seed of Chucky

  • Curse of Chucky

  • Cult of Chucky

  • Ghost in the Shell

  • The Godfather Part III

  • Matinee

  • Witness

  • Peeping Tom

Alex Thompson
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