2 Dec 2016
Owen Kline’s Closet Picks
The actor and filmmaker came in to work on a supplement for our The Squid and the Whale edition. We learned he’s a big fan of the Robert Downey Sr. Eclipse series.
Owen Kline: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
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.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Written on the Wind | Douglas Sirk | 1956 | |
| 2 |  Crumb | Terry Zwigoff | 1995 | |
| 3 |  The Shooting/Ride in the Whirlwind box set, 2 films | |||
| 4 |  The Horse’s Mouth | Ronald Neame | 1958 | |
| 5 |  Pickpocket | Robert Bresson | 1959 | |
| 6 |  Eclipse Series 33: Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. box set, 5 films | |||
| 7 |  The Golden Age of Television | |||
| 8 |  Paths of Glory | Stanley Kubrick | 1957 | |
| 9 |  The Naked Kiss | Samuel Fuller | 1964 |
How far across film history it reaches
1 of the choices is not on the axis: The Golden Age of Television (no year on record). Left off rather than placed at a guessed year.
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
13 of its 14 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 17.4 hours. The other one is unmatched, so the real figure is higher. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
What one of its choices was worth is not published for this visit. That figure divides the whole runtime by every choice, so a total missing one film would understate it rather than be approximately right.
How unusual this haul was
Its 9 choices had been taken by 3.56 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Three of them have been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Eclipse Series 33: Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr., taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Robert Downey Sr., through Babo 73, Robert Downey Sr., through Chafed Elbows, Robert Downey Sr., through No More Excuses, Robert Downey Sr., through Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight, Robert Downey Sr., through Putney Swope and Terry Zwigoff, through Crumb, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.