Movies are too fucking long these days imho

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.

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.

― sarahel, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

s1ocki is right, it's too boring to get into, but anyway it's a thing, not really put about by big-name postmodernists that i can recall, but it is a thing. i dunno if it would come up w/r/t adorno, let alone the "requisite" (lol) critiques/responses thereto.

s1ocki is right, it's too boring to get into, but anyway it's a thing, not really put about by big-name postmodernists that i can recall, but it is a thing. i dunno if it would come up w/r/t adorno, let alone the "requisite" (lol) critiques/responses thereto.

I don't think it's boring, but it just seems kinda a hard-to-stomach stretch of logic that esp. based on the most prevalent behavior and perception of people doesn't really seem relevant or accurate. Again, I'm a total dilettante, but from what I remember, "back in the day" people would go to see a particular movie, take note of the time it started which would be advertised on the marquee and in the newspaper, and show up on time.

current course offerings in my major where i went to college

you ee-diots.

Nobody said that MOST people did this ROUTINELY! It was just KNOWN to happen! One example wd be teenage couples turning up and going in whenever bcz, oh, maybe they weren't gonna watch a whole lot of the movie?

Unless it's one of those apocryphal Psycho stories, Hitchcock was worried about spectators entering after Janet Leigh's exit and wondering where she was.

guys

what's going on here

people who weren't ALIVE when movie theaters would admit you in the middle of the feature are claiming IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

good thing you're here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

hey guys just turned up in the middle of the thread, what's happening

an argument so boring my conscious mind can barely contain it has somehow broken out in the middle of my beautiful thread

guess I'll keep reading until it's over then catch up on the beginning tomorrow

anyway movies are too fucking long these days imo. sometimes this even applies to short movies, I see a lotta 90 minute documentaries that I wish were one-hour cable TV shows (being serious here)

no good comes of any thread where "meme" surfaces

^t bomb

You fucking amateurs

http://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2000/articles/essays/images/bathory/bathor11.jpg

guess I'll keep reading until it's over then catch up on the beginning tomorrow

― dmr, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dying

!!!! lmao @ dave tbh

When In Rome is only 91 minutes long but feels much, much longer.

Dinkytown flocked to the Varsity in the prewar years, when Fisher held "bank day" drawings for prizes such as new dishes, and sometimes even let patrons stay overnight in the cool air conditioning, which was provided by air pumped through water drawn from an underground well.

"Very few places had air conditioning in those days," says Beatrice Perper, one of Fisher's daughters, who worked the box office. "Many times in the summer, he left the theater open, so people could sleep there. He hired two people to stay and watch the theater. People used to bring whole families."

http://www.citypages.com/2005-03-09/arts/varsity-cheer/all

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

is it time for the film equivalent of this thread?

this thread was a right laugh, but i've never seen a thread so become so totally de-railed.

but yeah movies.. they're *mental* long these days agreed. especially comedies.

movies I've seen recently that were the perfect length: Taken (think this was like 80-90 minutes?), Toy Story 3 (~100 minutes), and nothing else

Watched Wendy and Lucy for the second time a couple of nights ago. 75 minutes--perfect. (Generally I like long films, though.)

http://www.onlinecharttool.com/test/img_files/20101229154240.png

Okay, so I plotted the average length of the top ten box office films for each year. I know more data points would have been nicer, but I've only got so much free time.

I like examining unexamined assumptions ("films are longer these days") - turns out this one might be true!

even more amazing is just *how* short they were 10 years ago. 107 minutes!

Excellent work. "I like examining unexamined assumptions"--for the folks on ILB, let me say that Bill James couldn't have said it better himself.

We need a data-analysis expert here. Your graph is persuasive, but a couple of red flags I'd raise: 1) is 10 films a year enough to start drawing conclusions (especially 10 that aren't random--maybe hits are longer by nature), and 2) maybe 2004-2009 is a blip; if you eliminate the last five years, you could say the length didn't increase at all from 1979-2004.

I don't know. I play a grade 6 math teacher in real life, but this one's above my pay grade.

that graph is dominated by statistical noise

i dont mind long movies - if the movie is too long for itself thats another thing - like transformers 2 prob just shouldve been a commercial or whatever

xpost -- We could retitle it 'supernovae are brighter these days'

skewing results: 12-minute end credits for horseshit effects-laden stuff

no good comes of any thread where "meme" surfaces

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, June 16, 2010 6:24 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

The end-credits is a good point--wouldn't be surprised if they account for most of the seven-minute difference between '79 and '09. I'm often hanging around right till the end of the credits to get the name of some song that caught my ear, and they go on forever. It doesn't even have to be a film with lots of special effects, very few of which I see--it applies to all films.

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/3725/chart1c.png

I have no idea what if anything I have learnt from this chart, but really I just wanted to see if I could web-scrape the data off IMDB, which I could, with 3 lines of Perl

(data is in a Google Docs spreadsheet here; some years have <50 rows of data because some movies didn't have a length showing up; data scraped from e.g. http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2010%2C2010&title_type=feature&sort=moviemeter%2Casc which uses imdb's own questionable "MovieMeter" ranking but the box office data gets pretty shaky the further back you go so eh)

looks about right to me. my guess is the average length hasn't changed that much, but there are currently (like in the last 5 years) a lot more 2.5 hour+ trashy movies.

So if that is about right then I dunno if it's more true to say that the 00s and the 60s had a lot of really long films or that the 70s and 80s had a lot of short films.

Anyway, I have a short attention span and grew up with 80s films, so if the plunge downwards right at the end means the trend is turning round again then I'm all for it.

(I don't trust the data here a whole bunch btw)

that imdb moviemeter thing is sketchy, but i'd be surprised if the top 50 were a particularly biased sample of successful mainstream movies. i can totally buy that there isn't a gross trend in running length. imo this thread inspired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias although i agree that there are probably more really dumb long movies than there used to be.

i wouldn't trust any results based on a year that hasn't finished though, especially with award season to come, which will boost (usu. longer) oscar-type movies into the top 50.

the issue here, comparing the 1950s with the present, is b-movies, i.e. second features. they were shorter than the main feature because duh. but now we don't have b-movies so.

Would all those musical-overture segments (which I assume were included in running times) from the big prestige roadshow films from the '60s make a difference? Not sure if there were enough of them to matter, but they seemed to run two or three minutes.

Of course, those films were already three or four hours long, so probably not.

well we're in difficult territory with that. there is a question of whether you would have had to endure them when the film got rolled out into regular cinemas. i genuinely dk. but those films were relatively rare -- this is about whether your average programmer is longer now.