Movies are too fucking long these days imho

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.

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.

Really? That doesn't sound like people not caring about narrative to me ...

yeah it's a thing. like the surrealists, it is said admiringly, would deliberately turn up midway through films just to vibe on them without knowing what was going on, story-wise.

yeah, but i don't know that surrealists constituted a significant demographic. thing is, although people would once upon a time watch movies in those big stretches (with comedy shorts, newsreels, and a couple features on the card), the films themselves tended to be short. so it was more like watching network tv for an evening than watching a single four hour hobbit epic.

i basically agree, but it varied. the tentpole movies of the 1920s were long as hell too!

ben hur: 143 min
the big parade: 141 min
thief of baghdad: 155 min

mayne, i think sarahel's point is that if people were just "vibing" they would stay til after the point when they came in, or wouldn't care about reaching that point.

it was a real thing - my dad and his brother would show up, stay for awhile, and when they recognized stuff they'd already seen they'd leave. i think many things in the 40s and 50s were much more casual experiences than they are now. sports, for instance. the emotional investment of fans and memorization of statistics was something for a very small group of "nuts". for most people going to the movies or going to a baseball game was like going down to the boardwalk - it was just something to do.

I'm paraphrasing completely, but in one of John Waters' books, he says he leaves almost every movie at 90 minutes in!

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.

The entire second half imo.

I remember learning in school that Shakespeare built in a lot of redundancy in his plays - repeating the same information a couple of times in different ways - because he was dealing with audiences who didn't catch every word or pay attention the whole way through. Maybe it's the same with the popcorn and mobile phone brigade.

90 min is kind of the perfect movie length imo

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