Movies are too fucking long these days imho

I always appreciate that Woody Allen keeps his movies trim. Match Point is the only one he's ever made that has been over two hours. Fifteen of his 39 movies have even been under 90 minutes (although the last one was Shadows and Fog in 1991.)

I am just going to post this here, in case I ever need to refer to it:

Whatever Works (2009): 92
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008): 96
Cassandra's Dream (2007): 108
Scoop (2006): 96
Match Point (2005): 124
Melinda and Melinda (2004): 99
Anything Else (2003): 108
Hollywood Ending (2002): 112
Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001): 103
Small Time Crooks (2000): 94
Sweet and Lowdown (1999): 95
Celebrity (1998): 113
Deconstructing Harry (1997): 96
Everybody Says I Love You (1996): 101
Mighty Aphrodite (1995): 95
Bullets Over Broadway (1994): 98
Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993): 104
Husbands and Wives (1992): 108
Shadows and Fog (1991): 85
Alice (1990): 102
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989(: 104
Another Woman (1988): 81
September (1987): 82
Radio Days (1987): 88
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986): 103
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985): 82
Broadway Danny Rose (1984): 84
Zelig (1983): 79
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982): 88
Stardust Memories (1980): 89
Manhattan (1979): 96
Interiors (1978): 93
Annie Hall (1977): 93
Love and Death (1975): 85
Sleeper (1973): 89
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (1972): 88
Bananas (1971): 82
Take the Money and Run (1969): 85
What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966): 80

This might be the most I've ever agreed with a thread!

(Heh, my gf, a huge fan of endless action and sci-fi movies, complained that Annie Hall was "too long"!)

I might be alone on this but I actually thought Splice could have really used another 15-20 minutes to help smooth out some rather, er, ungraceful plot movement.

I am with you on this one, slocki. I watched "Extract" the other day & it was not the best movie but I think I had a better opinion of it because at least it knew how long to be.

― breaking that little dog's heart chakra (Abbott), Monday, June 14, 2010 5:58 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

ya i think i felt the same way!

And, yes, I wouldn't mind this phenomenon so much if there were some sort of formal innovation going on to justify the length but when relatively standard comedies or action movies are just dragged out for that much longer, it does feel pretty ridiculous. (Funny People especially, particularly since I generally really enjoyed Apatow.)

xposts

I don't necessarily know if I agree that movies are "too long" but I agree that 99% of them waste a lot of time on dumb shit; ie it's not so much I believe movies should meet an arbitrary length of like 95 minutes but I do think they need to make better use of whatever time they take up

I can see if every minute you cut from a movie means you have to admit you wasted $10million on that scene, I'd feel stingy with the cuts.
How long are movies nowadays with budgets under $5 million?

i think Edward III is most on the money here in saying that its an auteur thing. i think it has to do with prestige not just for the studio/distributor but for the director or editors. i also dont think its a coincidence that we're now seeing tons of new 'directors cut,' 'extended edition,' etc DVDs that supposedly emphasize the true version of a film, implying that longer runtimes=more authenticity or whatever.

or even just how many times have you heard the story of how the studio tried to chop xxx scenes out of whatever classic movie or ruined magnificent ambersons? so if judd apatow is going to get 150 minutes for funny people hes not going to sabotage his own movie

not that that explains why the studio would be down with that

and tbh i enjoyed funny people for the most part

In apatow's defense, there isn't much he could cut that doesn't disrupt the main story, and the parts that he could cut are funnier/better than the main story.

In apatow's defense, he is fucking clueless

In apatow's defense, there isn't much he could cut that doesn't disrupt the main story, and the parts that he could cut are funnier/better than the main story.

― Philip Nunez, Monday, June 14, 2010 8:33 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

not much of a defense imho

people need a break from the minute long youtubes they watch all the time

ITT people making me happy that I don't watch new movies

Karate Kid really should have just been 85 minutes of 12-year-olds beating the living shit out of each other, hard-'R' style. Major improvement.

― Simon H., Monday, June 14, 2010 8:57 PM (Yesterday)

Under appreciated post.

personally i think comedies need a REALLY compelling reason to break 90 minutes. and any movie needs to seriously justify breaking the two-hour mark. every minute you go over that, you should owe the audience money or something

I agree 100%. I have a pretty firm 2 hr limit and anything over that I start to get so antsy it's ridiculous. 90 mins is the perfect length for most movies imo.

Spiderman 3 was so long it was a serious test of my will, and I lost.

I saw a midnight showing of that piece of crap on a weeknight and got about 3 hours of sleep as a result. I was so pissed.

Maybe swollen mediocre films are the natural counterpart to hugely fat mediocre novels:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/imagecache/review/files/small.HAMILTON_Judas%20Unchained.jpg

i can sit through a three hour movie in a theater no problem, but give me a DVD longer than 90 min and I literally fall asleep!

yeah me too. it's harder to pay attention at home for some reason.

Never mind watching something on your laptop.

Pretty sure Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre wasn't meant to be minimized so you can check your Facebook and e-mail (or was it??)

everything is too long these days if you ask me.

even worse than movie length are movie titles!

hardly anything is ever something simple like say, "Armadillo Man". it's gotta be "Armadillo Man: The Curse of the Last Beginning"

Armadillo Man 2: hardly anything is ever something simple

hahahahaha

ya

i cant stand watching movies on my laptop btw

i can barely watch an episode of 30 rock

so distracting

The worst is when you compromise while on your laptop, minimizing and only hearing certain scenes because they're not important enough to warrant your full attention.

This is not just a modern problem. Much love to The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch, but they could be trimmed to two hours without losing anything.

no way wild bunch is perfect

and anyway those are big epics about DOZENS & BUNCHES of characters doing all sorts of crazy things. when romcoms break the two-hour mark that's when we're in trouble.

Never mind watching something on your laptop.

Pretty sure Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre wasn't meant to be minimized so you can check your Facebook and e-mail (or was it??)

― Cunga, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 12:51 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark

a problem the ipad was meant to solve

(i'm serious, btw)

It's not length but lack of dramatic shape, pacing, choices, story, etc. to make the length work. It was obvious that Avatar was on the timetable of the guy who would have ruined Aliens with his director's cut. These movies are long because they're bad, not the other way around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0

LOL, forgot how great Lynch's voice is.

TBH I had no problem with the length of Avatar, or at least there wasn't anything in it that should've obviously been cut. I think sci-fi/fantasy movies set in different worlds, or historical epics set in not-so-well-known eras can justify 20-40 extra minutes to establish their setting. Moat sci-fi/fantasy flicks that last 90 minutes or so take place in our world, so they didn't need those extra minutes.

Speaking of Lynch, I thought Inland Empire was a really obvious case of an auteur given too much freedom, resulting in an overtly long mess. A good producer would've made him cut it at least 30 minutes shorter.

xpost

To turn that round a little bit I'd say yeah, fans of yr SF/Fantasy epics are probably happy to go see movies of that length the same way they only really trust huge fat septilogies of novels. You know what you're (not) going into.

For comedies tho there does seem to be a natural length after which you're not really gonna find anything hilarious cos you're laughed out/bored of the premise and I'd say that natural length is definitely no more than an hour and a half.

Being self-indulgent is obviously the point of a certain kind of auteur but I guess somebody could've got on Lynch's case and said "HEY Buñuel bought L'Age d'Or in at under an hour y'know?"

I think it depends on the nature of the comedy. Episodic/sketch comedy movies like The Meaning of Life or History of the World, Part 1 can justify a longer length because there's no one premise.

(x-post)

I think Lord of the Rings bears some culpability here.

xpost

Those movies don't even justify the running time they do have.

Armadillo Man 2: Electric Armoroo

or at least there wasn't anything in it that should've obviously been cut.

I would take it as a 15-minute short about riding dragons.

I can see if every minute you cut from a movie means you have to admit you wasted $10million on that scene, I'd feel stingy with the cuts.
How long are movies nowadays with budgets under $5 million?

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 12:35 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

it's more about cutting within a scene. the script tells you how long the film will be, and the studio budgets on the basis of the script. obviously it doesn't always work out like that, but that's the idea -- so the problem might be related to bad/rushed script development.

i thought 'funny people' didn't work, but if it *had*, i.e. if the stuff with his wife hadn't sucked, 150min would have been legit. his two earlier films were pretty long and they worked. on the whole, though, 85-100min is the thing to shoot for.

it's not an entirely new thing. 'psycho' does not need to be 109min, 'rio bravo' sure as hell does not need to be 140min, 'some like it hot' doesn't need to be two hours.

yeah maybe we are just hypersensitive to movie length in the age of youtube

I think directors should be made to drink a standard movie theater sized 44 oz tub of coke before viewing each rough cut of their movie

a couple people above say they're more willing to watch long movies in the theater than at home/on the computer/whatever, but i think the opposite is true is true for general audiences. for thirty years or so, we've been trained by self-programmed home viewing to watch films in bits and pieces, and therefore to tolerate much longer running times. movies aren't made to be watched in a single sitting anymore - they're more open-ended, made to be watched in whatever way the viewer prefers. this has de-emphasized tight, efficient storytelling in favor of sprawling digressiveness. i don't like it, personally, but american audiences in general seem to have no problem with two-and-a-half-hour comedies and three+ hour action flicks.

probably history mayne, or someone with a more thorough grounding on film history might contradict this, but from my understanding, it was common before television for people to sometimes spend all day at the theater, and watch several movies in a row. And then there was television, and people would watch several hours of television a night. The only difference to me isn't the amount of time spent watching, but spent watching a single film.

yeah, movie programmes were longer. you had like three hours of entertainment. in the olden days, the main feature and a bunch of shorts (travel films, endlessly reshown chaplins, newsreels). at some point you had the b-movie, which was usually less than 80 minutes, plus the main event. 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.

I am surprised the Patton Oswalt bit about filmmaking didn't appear here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcjlKcjVxTc

I just had to look up how long Roma is because I just feel it's way too long despite not having seen it yet. 135 minutes

I started watching Roma last November, still haven't finished it

Maybe we can make it a group project and everyone takes 15 minutes of it.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/12/movies-should-be-97-minutes-long.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw

Do you know how long Noah Baumbach’s torturous divorce drama Marriage Story is? Two hours and 17 minutes. It could have easily lost half an hour. Do you know how long the wacky whodunnit Knives Out is? Two hours and ten minutes. I really liked it, mostly, but it could be 20 minutes shorter, and it would be better for it. I liked It okay, but It Chapter Two is two hours and 50 minutes long. That is outrageous. I could watch four episodes of the Real Housewives in that time.

Marriage Story is a pretty complex narrative, didn't seem overlong.

I went to bed with half an hour left to go, figure I'll put it on and let them finish the complex narrative of shouting at each other while I'm cooking sometime

The Batman is going to be 2hrs 47min or some shit.

Looking on Netflix for a movie to watch (we don't tend to do this) we settled on "The Irishman" the Scorcese movie.

Man! I mean, a great movie, but three and a half hours!

Justified, but.

Isn’t it much longer than that?

Or did it just feel like it

Well, I looked it up, and I think officially it's a minute shorter, and the longest movie released to cinemas for thirty years or some such.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is apparently free on Kanopy now, but I have to set some time aside as it's 3hr 14 min

Everybody thinks the Andrei Tarkovsky remaking Ben Hur

Their

Hearing that John Wick 4 will weigh in at just under 3 hours.

Relevant: Last (x) Movies you are going to Avoid

movies I've seen 3+ hours or more in the last few years:

The Batman
Avatar 2
Avengers: Endgame

none of these are fuckin Cleopatra, I want a refund.

The Menu in part succeeds because it's succinct, it's less than two hours long.

don't wanna get dragged into that people-showing-up-at-random-during-the-middle-of-films-at-the-cinema-in-the-olden-days argument again but check this out

My mother insists that her mother brought her into a show of Witness for the Prosecution about thirty minutes from the end, and then they did exactly as Cleese describes. As soon as my grandmother had everything pieced together, she decreed that they had seen the film now and could leave.

Relevant: Last (x) Movies you are going to Avoid

did you hate Tár

bad movies are too fucking long ihibidtae

Solution: take out all icky sex scenes

#onethread