16 Apr 2017

Alexander Payne’s Closet Picks

The Oscar-winning writer-director sings the praises of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day and cops to never having seen Robert Altman’s 3 Women .

Alexander Payne: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

11

every one a single film

single films

11

chosen on their own

box sets

0

none this visit

films reached

11

no set to open

Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com

This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.

17 Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom 1976 396 Ace in the Hole 1951 230 3 Women 1977 98 L’avventura 1960 444 Le plaisir 1952 609 ¡Alambrista! 1977 889 The Breaking Point 1950 788 Speedy 1928 159 Red Beard 1965 778 A Special Day 1977 840 The Executioner 1963

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom	Pier Paolo Pasolini	1976	11
2	Ace in the Hole	Billy Wilder	1951	6
3	3 Women	Robert Altman	1977	9
4	L’avventura	Michelangelo Antonioni	1960	7
5	Le plaisir	Max Ophuls	1952	1
6	¡Alambrista!	Robert M. Young	1977	1
7	The Breaking Point	Michael Curtiz	1950	1
8	Speedy	Ted Wilde	1928	1
9	Red Beard	Akira Kurosawa	1965	2
10	A Special Day	Ettore Scola	1977	5
11	The Executioner	Luis García Berlanga	1963	2

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1928 to 1977

a single film, at its year the collection, by decade

The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.

How long this haul is

Its 11films run 20.9 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 114.1 minutes of film for each of its 11 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.

How unusual this haul was

Its 11 choices had been taken by 4.18 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Four of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Le plaisir, taken by this visit alone.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com