Movies are too fucking long these days imho

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

movies may have been long, or overlong, in the olden days, but the standardization of the 2.5 hour movie is kind of a new and terrible thing imo

and ya it is probably peter jackson's fault

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

My mum would show up, stay for awhile, and if it was an British film they'd leave

Peter Jackson should be blamed for a lot of things, but long movies isn't one of them. Though he should probably have gone with 5 movies tbh.

in what way should this guy not be blamed for long movies - did u see the last LOTR? or the first HOUR of king kong??

I don't blame him for long movies but he deserves some blame for movies that seem longer than they actually are

what about movies that are actually long, like the movies that he makes

i remember reading an interview w/ some movie theater lobbyist type where he kept trying to justify movie ticket prices by comparing the "cinemagoing experience" to, like, sporting events (i.e., its only $10 for a movie but $30 for a baseball game.) probably they want the longer movies because viewers feel like theyre getting "more bang for their buck"--it allows them to justify the high ticket prices and "compete" w/ like football i guess

^ prob'ly true

did u see the last LOTR? or the first HOUR of king kong??

― delanie griffith (s1ocki), 15 June 2010 13:38 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

(i) Yeah, they left out about 1 hour of good material for brevity's sake

(ii) aw hell no i didn't.

Pulp Fiction - 154 min

that's definitely the main motivaysh behind 3D, which they also charge way more for

imo with ticket prices going up, i'm OK with the idea of getting more of your money's worth, but yeah most movies just aren't meant to sustain really long runtimes. maybe they should do more Grindhouse-style double features with a director or team of directors combing 2 or 3 complementary stories. or bring back cartoon shorts before the movie!

again, pulp fiction was a pretty "big" movie with tons of characters & storylines. what bothers me is movies not even close to attempting that kind of scale running that long.

Saw one of those P. Jackson hobbit movies in cinema once - not my choice - my arse fell asleep

imo with ticket prices going up, i'm OK with the idea of getting more of your money's worth, but yeah most movies just aren't meant to sustain really long runtimes. maybe they should do more Grindhouse-style double features with a director or team of directors combing 2 or 3 complementary stories. or bring back cartoon shorts before the movie!

― some dude, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 9:46 AM (25 seconds ago) Bookmark

good idea but sadly it'll never happen cuz grindhouse tanked so so bad

max that sounds sensible except for the distinct lack of ice-cold budweiser being delivered to me in my cinema seat

imo with ticket prices going up, i'm OK with the idea of getting more of your money's worth, but yeah most movies just aren't meant to sustain really long runtimes. maybe they should do more Grindhouse-style double features with a director or team of directors combing 2 or 3 complementary stories. or bring back cartoon shorts before the movie!

― some dude, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 9:46 AM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah the only time i really feel like i get 'bang for my buck' is when i sneak into a second movie, but its like torture to do that now when movies are two hours long, i emerge from the theater blind and pale and weak

movies - 5-6 £/h
books - £2/h?
videogames - £1/h?
albums - 50p/h?

movies never gonna cut it at that rate