Movies are too fucking long these days imho

or the pressure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_theatrical_release

(^movies with intermissions)

I've seen 80-minute movies that dragged. Length seems secondary: It's about storytelling.

This is the truth. A great rule of thumb I heard long ago is that it doesn't matter how long it actually is so much as how long it seemed to be (this was either Pauline Kael or Dr. Ruth that said that)

There are two hour movies that fly by and there are 90 minute movies that make you check your watch every three minutes.

One thing I love about the original Bad News Bears is how it introduces credits, setting, plot, and all but one of its main characters under the 8-minute mark, all at a leisurely pace, and gets right onto the field:

die hard is the best example of this i've ever seen... EVERYTHING is set up so fast

and YA GUYS of course bad movies seem longer and good movies fly by but that's not really what i'm talking about here. i'm talking about sex and the city being 2.5 hours long. regardless of the good/bad rule, some movies should not be that long. objectively.

is there anything that we can do about this?

http://tkcollier.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/mob_pitchforks_small.jpg

http://werkinggerl.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/revolution.jpg

i mean, can we start some kind of facebook viral campaign that gets a hit on the NYT arts blog and prompts a quote from someone at a studio who says "hmm maybe we'll think about delivering more focused product"

or something?

cos otherwise it seems like the institutional forces are moving towards bloat. i hadn't even thought of the "competing with a ballgame" angle

let's all vow to walk out of movies at the 90 minute mark

we can do a hashtag too

the only thing hollywood understands is money, so let's...raise a bunch of money and pay them to make shorter movies.

i'll set up a paypal

#peacingat90

mail white powder to everyone in the editor's guild

xp lol

If people were really clamoring for shorter movies, they would have made fan edits with brevity as a primary goal, and more people would watch those than the original.
I'll admit the five minute "fan" edit of Fast & Furious sounds worth paying for.

http://vimeo.com/11890554

funny people is one thing but what really blows my mind is that someone thought a movie with a jonah hill anal rape gag in it needed to be 110 minutes

how long was Furry Vengeance?

Movies take forever to get started these days.

feeling this. hate how really slow music-driven opening credits sequences and long misleading or ambiguous first scenes have become the standard for like every genre practically.

ya... the iron man 2 "welding & newspaper clips montage" bothered me in partics

how long was Furry Vengeance?

92 minutes, according to wiki. About right for what looks like a steaming pile of shit. Then again, I just now see that Ken Jeong, Rob Riggle and Wallace Shawn were in it!

Haven't seen Sex and the City 2, but can't it be worse than Woody's September or Shadows and Fog?

lololol at the 2 minutes 2fast2furious. I was checking my watch at the 1:30 mark, thinking "jeez hasn't it already been 2 min"?

let's all vow to walk out of movies at the 90 minute mark

― delanie griffith (s1ocki), Tuesday, 15 June 2010 19:51 (Yesterday)

this would only be noticed if you paid 90/(total running time) of the ticket price though.

s1ocki, you complained about Un Prophet being too long iirc but that movie wasn't actually too long imo, it moved really fast and was well made. the film was okay, not great, and certainly not the masterpiece it was hailed as (or anywhere close to it) but it justified its length.

i dunno i felt it could have lost 20-30 mins no problem

he problem is more to do with regular films pushing past 120 minutes

Ordinary fuckin' "regular" films -- I hate em. Stop going.

looking up run times of movies I like, noticed that Wonder Boys clocks in at 1:47 (which is sort of surprising for '00s adult comedy/drama) - maybe it's not a great movie, but it does a lot with a sub-2 hour run time.

And the novel on which it's based is much too long.

I don't remember much being cut out from the novel.

Lots of bits of business didn't make it.

One movie that rally sticks out for me for its economy is The Squid and the Whale.

*really

Ordinary fuckin' "regular" films -- I hate em. Stop going.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, June 15, 2010 10:23 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

you don't like movies that aren't epics or sagas?

finally found a "short" action movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5KeUMxyAwM

Ordinary fuckin' "regular" films -- I hate em. Stop going.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, June 16, 2010 2:23 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

But you like "Only the Lonely?"

Repo Man was pretty economical in length, i'm pretty sure.

"Black Book" was hella long but zipped by

then again it covered WWII up to the establishment of Israel, so...

s1ocki, you complained about Un Prophet being too long iirc but that movie wasn't actually too long imo, it moved really fast and was well made. the film was okay, not great, and certainly not the masterpiece it was hailed as (or anywhere close to it) but it justified its length.

― jed_, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
i dunno i felt it could have lost 20-30 mins no problem

― delanie griffith (s1ocki), Wednesday, 16 June 2010 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

But that's quite a long way from SATC2 where it seems really to be inflated by perhaps an hour to give extra 'value', as oposed to The Prophet, where slight misjudgements might have been made in plotting.

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.

People talking afterward was all a mix of 'this was great' but also 'three hours'!

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.