My film watchlist has achieved truly preposterous dimensions over the years, and especially over the last year or so as I’ve started getting back into film-watching and accruing a bunch of new things that have just blown the watchlist up even further. I need to start making some inroads into it, and I need to start being a bit more methodical about it… to which end I’m going to go through some box sets and other collections I’ve started but haven’t finished, of which I have several… I mean, I bought four such boxes in the last Severin sale, each of which had four titles in it that I haven’t seen, and I’ve got forthcoming two sets of early Hitchcock (though at least I’ve previously seen some of those), a bunch of other Imprint boxes I’ve barely glanced at, giallo sets from Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome, and a shit ton of martial arts stuff, mostly in those big Shawscope collections from Arrow…
So I’ve acquired an awful lot over the last year or so, and, let’s face it, I’m still doing so… I mean, if the companies are going to insist on putting out stuff that grabs my attention, I’m not going to tell them not to. Vinegar Syndrome’s putting Alraune out? How can I refuse? And I have a ton of stuff I want to rewatch, too, on top of the stupid amount of unseen stuff, so there’ll be more of that too as I upgrade some older holdings. But getting the list of unseen titles down is much more important, so I’ve got to focus on new watches over rewatches. Maybe a one-in one-out type thing, only one rewatch for whatever number of new ones, so I can try and get the list back down to marginally less unmanageable numbers.
Accordingly, I’m also declaring an end to the Century of Cinema challenge. It’s been directing almost all my viewing this year, apart from a handful of titles I did rewatch independent of the challenge, and frankly it’s been getting in the way… cos I kept feeling like I should be pursuing that first, but I have so much other stuff that wouldn’t count towards it and which, frankly, I’d rather have watched instead. So that kind of reached the point where I’d go for days not watching anything, only watched two things in all of September. So Century of Cinema is over at about 60% done. Unfortunate but I think it’s the only way ahead. My own fault, of course, cos I should’ve remembered how shit I am at this sort of thing… I mean, I suppose this project to cut my watchlist down is a challenge of that kind, too, but it’s self-imposed and there’s no real guidelines I need to stick to…
So just how many unseen titles are we talking about? As of right now… 2138, per the spreadsheet where I keep track of these things. Fucking hell. On the plus side, a substantial chunk of those are actually shorts, so I suppose at least those won’t take too long to finish off? And a similarly big chunk is stuff I’ve downloaded that I may never actually watch and should probably cross off the list. Sigh. Anyway, at least I’ve made a public record here of just how bad the watchlist is at this point, and once I’ve added the things that should be here in the next few days I need to let it never get that bad again…
