Movies are too fucking long these days imho

Had a similar experience at the NFT not too long ago with Once Upon a Time in America. Now there's a long-arse film (orginal director's cut TEN HOURS apparently). I enjoyed it, but the break was extremely welcome.

10 hour OUATIA would be a weekend must-watch for me

ppl use the phrase "director's cut" any old way huh

more like director's uncut

this new prolixity is definitely a thing but i dunno if it's so bad in itself

if a shit film is too long then the duration isn't rly the problem, unless yr a critic and are obliged to sit through the whole film in which case it will seem all the more hateful

but for solid above-avg hwood pics (which i probably don't watch enough of), 2+ hr runtimes are usually acceptable in creating a more thorough immersion in w/e fictional world is expensively created

it grinds my gears because 1) with a long movie, factor in trailers and frankly, the likelihood is i will need a piss, 2) (related, kinda) films that start mid-evening and end after last orders is some bullshit

tristan tzara's syphilitic genitourinary problems and acute diuresis were actually the source of the surrealists' film-watching habits

print the legend tho

Caught a screening of Seven Samourai last night. Perfect three hour film, but the NFT had a 5-10 intermission (a screen with a japanese character (which I suppose might have meant 'intermission') and music). The guy who introduced said it wasn't really a break as such.

Yeah, I think Seven Samurai justifies its 3,5 hour length... Though apparently there are also 3 hour and 2,5 hour shorter cuts of it in existence, but I've only seen the original cut, so I have no idea how well the other versions work. And the intermission (along with the japanese text and intermission music) was part of the original version of the movie, or at least that's how it was introduced when I saw it at a local film archive. I love Seven Samurai, but I still think it was nice to take a break in the middle of such a lengthy film, I'm not sure why movies these days don't have intermissions any more. IMO every movie that lasts more than 3 hours should have one.

2001 had an intermission in its initial run and a re-release I saw in '74, and it's only 135 minutes (tho Kubrick trimmed it after the opening).

Am guessing that the dvd is the same but blu-ray of 2001 has the "Intermission" card half way through. I stick the kettle on when it appears.

i saw it last year and im sure we had an intermish

The new/old intermission: waiting one week for the next episode.

intermissions are too fucking long these days imo

words are too fucking long these days imo, intermish is the approp spellng from now on

Why not intrmisn?

ending words in 'ish' is the new 90 min rom com for the twit crowd, pass it on

suggest banish

ya 2001 has a pretty sweet intermission card with the (ligeti?) music playing over it

i saw Superman 2 with a friend and his family as a kid (having already seen it once in full thank god) and they made us go in half way through the film just as Lex is waving his white hankie at Zod in the White House. Then we watched 'til the end, sat through the rest of the 'programme' (trailers, a short film about solar energy etc) and then left just after Zod and Co start tearing up the place. Didn't understand it then, don't understand it now. But yeah i agree that it's become a meme that this happened.. but then i also was part of it happening!

That's grounds for arrest. Superman II is at the top of the heap for comic book movie sequels.

i don't understand the meme part

Not to mention that I don't wanna be there when Zod finds out you walked out of the movie.

Meme part was in response to
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up to a point people turned up mid-programme, and stayed on to "where they came in".

i mean, this is what people say happened, but programme start-times were given in newspapers etc. -- imho this became a meme because postmodernist movie critics/historians like the idea of people just like turning up and not caring about narrative man.

― sites.younglife.org:8080 (history mayne), Tuesday, 15 June 2010 09:57 (Yesterday)
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ah

if that's a meme so is the world series

but it's more said of the thirties than 1980

the meme part is not turning up whenever, which probably happened (though was definitely unusual in the extreme by 1980), but people later on saying that "turning up whenever" was better than the fascist, time-table-ist modern way of doing things. idk, none of the olds in my family thought it was a good way to see films, and people turning up halfway through was and is annoying as balls. though some of these same olds say that they always preferred the b-picture -- which is kind of a meme.

they sure loved memes. back then

no they didn't, that's just a meme

most ppl from the 30s-50s seem to recall it fondly when they recall it, but i guess that's more printable nostalgic than bitching abt it. i'm not sure abt individual start times in the bill being advertised routinely btw: i know Rank had to specifically try to get exhibitors in Britain to advertise start times for Henry V in 1944.

among the uninformed shit i've heard people say in my long career as a film academic is that until the 60s ppl didn't know when films started, and just showed up and took their chances, staying round till when they came in (if they wanted to, man, if they cared about plots and all that mess). it's true that in most cinemas they'd let you stay in once you were there, but it just isn't true that people didn't know start-times.

xpost

you'd get programme start times back in the '20s, routinely. as with today, you could make a calculaish based on how long the main film was likely to be, etc., if you just wanted the main film. of course, there were many more suburban cinemas etc etc, and there's no really good sampling.

among the uninformed shit i've heard people say in my long career as a film academic is that until the 60s ppl didn't know when films started

what the hell. why would anyone believe this.

it's fun

i don't think it's uninformed shit, it's abt moviegoing in the days of continuous programs, where a bill of newsreels, shorts, b feature and main feature would show on loop!

so ppl get programme start times & then in mayne's take they turn up at the start of the loop or calculate as opposed to "turning up in the middle"...they were turning up in the midde of something even if they were calculating abt likelihoods... so it's a reach calling the "took their chances" take on this moviegoing uninformed shit in contrast. u must really hate the postmodernists to be so dogmatic abt this minor grist to their mill.

it was a loop of a basically fixed length, with given start times, and a work-out-able time at which the main feature would begin. even modern cinemas (where i live) don't give the actual movie start-time. im saying that ppl who turned up 45 minutes into 'casablanca' and got their arses in everyone's face finding a seat would not have been super-popular.

there were (iirc) theatres that only really showed news, cartoons, shorts, etc: obviously they were different.

xpost

the literature is full of accounts of ppl & by ppl who just showed up in the middle, postmodernists weren't guessing based on the fact continuous programs existed.

think your olds were just the morbz of their day tbh, as was morbz obv

the literature isn't that full, and lol at the postmodernists using evidence n e way. i hear enough completely made-up garbage from non-philosophers. think of it practically: people back then weren't stupid, they enjoyed stories, etc. people did go late, sure, but in the main? it would have been a p lame experience once the feature film became a thing.

anyway:

brooklyn's finest: 132 fucking minutes

this is where i get all reactionary and say that a default position of opposition to business has rendered these "po mo academics" (if they exist in the way HM is describing them) unable to think straight.

why would film distributors and exhibitors be content with their public being totally ignorant of when shit was going to be on? it doesn't make any sense at all, from a business perspective.

i mean, fine, ppl went to a shitload more movies in the first half of the century and so showing up late or whatever was prob more common. but this implication that teh cinema used to be some kind of free zone of time-un-delimited viewer experience, and now is a rigid oppressive airport of kapitalist kontrol, eh, i'd need some more data to believe that.

lol xp

bored now

I remember thinking Bad Boys II should have tacked on 30 minutes of Will Smith rapping and gone full Bollywood. That's true of just about every blockbuster now.

uh i kinda went off there didn't i :/

Stephen Fry says in the '...Washpot' book that he and a mate bunked off school, went to London, stayed in a cheap hotel and spent 4 days watching the same few films over and over and over. Basically he bought the 1 ticket at the start of the day and sat there watching again and again. Cabaret, Godfather and A Clockwork Orange in fact. That's something i've read/ heard many an indolent adolescent say they did back in the day.

I'm just curious which PoMo academics are writing/believing/arguing this. I've been out of school for a while, and my major allowed me to be a bit of a dilettante, but I still hadn't heard about this at all, even in the requisite critiques/responses to Adorno's condemnation of popular film as the new opiate of the masses.

Coming in in the middle seems like it would be a product of the cable era - flipping channels, might as well watch the last half of Jurassic Park. Or Rounders is on again, maybe I'll catch the weird-ass Malkovich scene and then go on my way.

I fell asleep during several crucial parts of 4 Months 3 weeks... and for awhile I thought it was a comedy about awkward family dinners.

yeah having a lot of movie channels on cable has made me pretty careless about how i watch a lot of movies, sometimes i'll turn it on in the middle and get hooked and watch til the end, then watch the first half a couple days later and piece together anything that didn't make sense about the end the first time.

Basically he bought the 1 ticket at the start of the day and sat there watching again and again

At least they actually watched the movies--back in the days of cheap urban fleapit theaters, many homeless people bought tickets just so that could have a warm/cool and rainless place to sleep.

xp I've heard about (and seen old advertising for) theaters devoted to newsreels, but I've never heard of theaters just for short subjects*.

*Insert your own Terror of Tiny Town joke here.

That *they* could, I mean.