26 Jun 2023
Patton Oswalt’s Closet Picks
The actor and comedian gravitates to 1940s film noir, the “weirdly timely” shock comedy of John Waters, and movies with memorable soundtracks.
Patton Oswalt: 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 |  Forty Guns | Samuel Fuller | 1957 | |
| 2 |  Detour | Edgar G. Ulmer | 1945 | |
| 3 |  Female Trouble | John Waters | 1974 | |
| 4 |  The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice | Yasujiro Ozu | 1952 | |
| 5 |  Le samouraï | Jean-Pierre Melville | 1967 | |
| 6 |  Frownland | Ronald Bronstein | 2007 | |
| 7 |  Pale Flower | Masahiro Shinoda | 1964 | |
| 8 |  Dekalog | Krzysztof Kieślowski | 1988 | |
| 9 |  One False Move | Carl Franklin | 1992 |
How far across film history it reaches
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
8 of its 9 films carry a runtime, and those alone run at least 12.9 hours. One of the others is a television series, which has no total on record at all: TMDB gives one episode's length, not a series'. 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 4.33 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Pale Flower, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Carl Franklin, through One False Move and John Waters, through Female Trouble, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.