To celebrate my retirement (which is a retrofitted justification; I’d have done this anyhow), S. and I woke up at 5 AM Friday, left the house at 5:30, and drove down to Portland for the Criterion Mobile Closet. We didn’t get back home until 10 PM. This… is our story.
Seattle to Portland chews up about 80-90% of our ID.4’s battery, depending on weather. Usually we pause for a 30 minute charge somewhere north of Portland, so we have more flexibility coming home. This time we knew we had to get there early in order to secure a spot in line, so we just pushed through, arriving with around 60 miles of range left. Plenty.
We grabbed parking in a nearby lot and wandered over to the rather lovely South Park Blocks, where the Mobile Closet van was posted up next to the Portland Art Museum. The museum was the local partner for the event. An unofficial line had formed.
As we were warned, at 9:30 AM the official line started and nobody from Criterion made any effort to preserve the ordering of the unofficial line. Which is what unofficial means, I suppose. Societal pressure failed immediately, the folks at the very back of the unofficial line wound up in front of the official line thanks to the vagaries of line geometry, and we wound up probably about 75% of the way back.
No real harm, no real foul. We were still gonna get in on Friday. The line closed out around 9:50 and the Criterion employees started setting up groups. For efficiency, they divided us into groups of three or four people, with each one sharing the three minutes in the closet. We wound up hanging out with Jose and Chris, both of whom were great fun to talk with all day so that was a relief for my introverted self.
They really push the idea of community during the whole process. It turns out the people staffing the event are mostly full time Criterion employees, and it’s really nice for them to be able to meet their fans because most of the fan interaction you get in an office is customers with issues. They don’t want people getting their place secured and then heading off to nap or whatever; they want conversation.
So here’s Peter Becker, president of the Criterion Collection, telling stories to us. We also met Kim Hendrickson, executive producer, who works on all the disc extras and produces the closet videos and so on.
Kim was super-generous with her time; lots of great stories about working with David Byrne, pictures of her lovely dog Charlie, and some mutual Aki Kaurismäki fandom. Peter was a hoot; towards the end of our line experience, he very seriously produced a short feature starring the Criterion van itself.
We also extracted a little hot news from an employee who will remain nameless just in case this wasn’t supposed to spill: first, there’s a new Deliverance release coming next year, and it sounds like it’s a new 4K restoration. Second, very exciting for me: the Criterion Channel is moving off Vimeo! This is very good news since Vimeo was just purchased by Bending Spoons, and Bending Spoons does not have a good track record for maintaining services. If you wondered why Meetup was charging people for basic functionality, or why Evernote has fallen apart, Bending Spoons is a big part of it. So getting off Vimeo is almost certainly good news.
Around noon I snuck off for lunch at a nearby food truck pod. Very tasty.
Then back to the line. I have never waited in line for anything even half as long as I waited this day.
We had some hopes that they were overestimating the wait time on purpose for some psychological reason, but nope. They did keep coming around with snacks and water. Also, there was a tent showing Adventures in Moviegoing episodes right at the 3 hour point, which was a nice chance to catch a quick break from standing.
We also got to play a trivia game. For being a beat faster than anyone else on knowing which fictional band played songs like “Hellhole” and “Stonehenge,” I won this neat book full of movie posters as postcards. I think I’m gonna swap them in and out for desk decorations rather than mail them off. Happily, all four of our group members won one – S. plucked Heat out of thin air as the remake of his TV movie L.A. Takedown.
Right at 5 PM, we finally make it to the front of the line and the back of the van. That video screen you can see on the side of the van in the image I’m about to add to this post runs non-stop Criterion Closet videos. I should explain how the Criterion Mobile Closet works: it’s not anything you can fit in the bag for free. You pick three items, which can be boxed sets, and you get a 40% discount. It’s more cost effective to wait for the Criterion or Barnes and Noble sales, but of course that’s not the point – you’re there for the experience.
S. and I had carefully picked one box set, the Zatoichi set, and one pick for each of us, Point Blank for me and Rififi for her. That’s us voluntarily limiting ourselves to three movies, even though we could have done three each. Someone on the videos, I can’t remember who, picked Memories of Murder which almost caused us to lose all our discipline and add three more movies because S. really wants to watch that one. We’d have thrown in the Wim Wenders Road Trilogy box as a second boxed set and… yeah. Better to maintain our focus. We managed it.
Anyway, here’s the van right before our turn.
And here, at long last, is our very own Criterion Closet video and Polaroid. They let one person per group stick their phone in a mount on the back wall and film the whole thing. For my money the highlight is all of us failing to remember the actual title of a great Jim Jarmusch movie. Especially because I got to turn Jose onto Aki Kaurismäki later.
Then we drove up north to a strip mall parking lot and charged on a Tesla charger with a way too short cable before making our way home to Seattle. We arrived at 10 PM, almost on the dot. 16.5 hours for that three minute experience. Worth it? Oh hell yeah.