Movies are too fucking long these days imho

sex and the city 2 - 154 minutes
transformers 2 - ~150 minutes
karate kid - 139 minutes
funny people - ~150 minutes

WHY IS EVERYTHING 2.5 HOURS LONG THESE DAYS?

who does it benefit? not the studios or the distributors or the exhibitors, as it cuts down on showtimes.

not the audiences.

the filmmakers?

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.

blame titanic

if attendance is dropping inexorably (right?) maybe the "cuts down on showtimes" isn't much of a problem anyway? seems like a "give ppl their money's worth" kind of thing, esp on DVD

Movies are too fucking long these days imho

srsly

avatar -- hell of long
robin wood -- like two and a half hours?

but it's even more of a problem with non-blockbustery movies

lazy fucking editing

and thinking (whether it's true or not) that ppl need everything spelled out for them

ban flashbacks and voiceovers forever

yeah I wish they made transformers 2 and sex in the city 2 better

Been saying this for years man. Love and can live with a lot of long "art" movies - there is an argument about editing to be had there too, but it's different - but a comedy over 90 or an actioner over 100-ish minutes is invariably some bullshit imo.

Worst is when it's kids movies and I don't even really wanna be there - that first Pirates of the Caribbean felt like sitting thru Shoah or sump'n

yeah I wish they made transformers 2 and sex in the city 2 better

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, June 14, 2010 1:43 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

...

karate kid is 139 minutes? that's insane

how long is 'a team'

more time for people to talk and send text messages

and livetweet

is there more stuff happening in these movies vs their 10-20 years ago counterparts or do they just draw the stuff out more (ie longer chase/fighting scenes)?

Funny People was definitely too long, the whole "getting back together with the ex" segment should've been cut altogether, as the main drama was between the two comedian guys, and the ex subplot just felt extraneous to that.

I have no problem with epic/historical movies being long though. If anything, I thought the new Robin Hood movie was too short, it felt like the conflicts during the second half of the movie were solved too quickly and easily. I would've wanted some more medieval political drama plus swordfights.

I've been wondering about this for years. It seems insane that SATC2 is a minute longer than Apocalypse Now. Romcoms and action movies have no excuse for topping 120 mins. These days I welcome a 90 minute movie like I welcome a 40 minute album - show some discipline ffs.

Karate Kid - and this isn't like a recommendation that you should drop $10 on it - Karate Kid was actually decent to watch for 139 min. I took my kid this weekend and neither of us got bored.

Trailer for it looked alright, true. Doesn't need to be that long tho.

Spiderman 3 was so long it was a serious test of my will, and I lost. I think the big problem is these movies are so long yet the pacing is maintained - always big flashy action scenes, introducing new characters, packing in way too much info. The more a word is repeated the more it loses its meaning, and the more time these kind of movies go on the less I care about what happens.

If you wanna make a 2 1/2 hour movie then have at least a few spots that are beautifully ambient or hypnotic, in order to give the eyes a break, let us reflect on what we are seeing, and sum up the grandeur of the film experience.

who does it benefit? not the studios or the distributors or the exhibitors, as it cuts down on showtimes.

not the audiences.

the filmmakers?

actually I think it's a prestige thing for the studios, a subtle marketing message to distributors/exhibitors: "here's the release you should care about this season"

of course that prestige used to be reserved for THE NEW FILM BY FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA and now it's spent on ANY OLD GARBAGE WE RECYCLED FROM TV/VIDEO GAMES/YOUR YOUTH

don't get me started on albums longer than 45 minutes

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.

funny people - ~150 minutes

^ I understand this, apatow's an auteur now

i dunno if this is a particularly new thing but yeah i can't stand movies > 1.5 hours long

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.

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.

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

it'd be good if they decided to give us 'more bang for our book' by making better movies that you didn't immediately forget, or never want to think about again, etc

i emerge from the theater blind and pale and weak

― max, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 2:47 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

jaggeresque

Mick or Louis?

i so rarely go to the theater anymore that tbh that this is kind of a non-issue for me -- even when watching like an hourlong show on DVD or OnDemand or whatever, I'll end up pausing it to change the baby's diaper or check my e-mail or something. so when I rent some longer movie like Inglourious Basterds, I end up watching it in installments over the course of 2-3 days.

max otm, though, i always feel like some bleary-eyed vampire when walking out of a movie theater while there's still some daylight

don't take some little dude to the movies

i emerge from the theater blind and pale and weak

"You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want..."

Fits with the song

i was fully down with inglourious basterds' running time

people who take little babies to movies are disgusting savages imo

particularly in-flight movies imo

but yeah i wasn't implying IB's length was a problem like it is for most of the movies we're talking about here (although i didn't love it like other people seem to, but that's a different convo)

ya i'm just throwing that out there

long wwii epics = fine
long rob reiner-esque romcoms = so not fine

is how i break it down to an extent

otm

i watched valentines day on the plane this weekend, probably the most embarrassing movie ive ever seen, but its not a good topic for discussion as no amount of cutting could have turned that into a well-made movie

long middle earth epics = ???
long remakes of classics = ???

think your position is a bit confused here tbh

no i definitely think the LOTR movies "deserve" to be long (though not as long as they were), but i still blame them for making movies that long OK

get it?

i don't think it's fair to blame them at all. epics and adaptations have always been epic length, we're talking about movies that aren't traditionally long getting longer.

Titanic is probably a better scapegoat, just on a "well, we spent all this money, might as well put everything we can onscreen" tip.

slocks is right

roadshow-type pix have always been long, ever since, like, 'birth of a nation'

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

still don't really get it since the objection doesn't seem to be that these long popcorn movies drag but that they...take up too much of your life or something?

they fuckin drag believe me

still don't really get it since the objection doesn't seem to be that these long popcorn movies drag but that they...take up too much of your life or something?

― dat nigga del griffith (zvookster), Tuesday, June 15, 2010 3:16 PM (51 seconds ago) Bookmark

it is kind of a professional concern for reviewers. tummies begin to rumble c. 110 minutes yo.

haha well i get it if they drag, idk it just seemed more philosophical than that

philosophical angle - "why are so many shitty movies dragging these days"

"No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough." – Roger Ebert

marley and me: 115min
the bounty hunter: 110min

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

movies never gonna cut it at that rate

I can see the others, but how do you get albums at 50p per hour? Most albums aren't even an hour long, and depending on format they can cost well over £15. Unless you're offsetting free download/spotify albums against bought albums, but that's a whole different thing. Or replay value, but then you can rewatch films if you buy instead of go to the cinema...

Also, it doesn't seem like anyone has linked to this other relevant thread: Your ideal length of a film

TV shows get to have it both ways - they're an hour at most, yet the "experience" lasts months and even years. And you can charge out the wazoo for the DVDs.

Why dont movies just have a 10-min intermission?

Gandhi did. The movie theater even had some old reel they put on, with candy-stripes and big white capital letters that said "INTERMISSION".

historias extraordinarias had TWO intermissions!

Or replay value, but then you can rewatch films if you buy instead of go to the cinema...

was thinking of replay value, and that is true but that would count for videos, as a separate category from movies.

pretty stupid metric anyway tbh.

Lots of movies have an intermission, but it always seems to be taken out of the DVD?

i'm sure i remember intermissions in movies all the time when i was a kid.

i think heat had one when i saw it (not a kid by then).

people like to think theyre getting their moneys worth. its like 78 minute cds.

I am usually waiting for film to end when I do go to the cinema. Weird example of one time I kinda wanted it to carry on: Cloverfield.

Fantastic Mr Fox was a wonderful movie for many reasons, not least of which is thanks to its 87 minute running time.

I've seen 80-minute movies that dragged. Length seems secondary: It's about storytelling. Think about how even your longest favorite movies begin immediately (the great opening in The Godfather), or how length suits either the sweep of years of the pressure of close quarters in Reds, Prince of the City, Das Boot, etc.

Movies take forever to get started these days. 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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgk_8Ydy0_M

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.

2001 had an intermission in its initial run and a re-release I saw in '74, and it's only 135 minutes (tho Kubrick trimmed it after the opening).

Am guessing that the dvd is the same but blu-ray of 2001 has the "Intermission" card half way through. I stick the kettle on when it appears.

i saw it last year and im sure we had an intermish

The new/old intermission: waiting one week for the next episode.

intermissions are too fucking long these days imo

words are too fucking long these days imo, intermish is the approp spellng from now on

Why not intrmisn?

ending words in 'ish' is the new 90 min rom com for the twit crowd, pass it on

suggest banish

ya 2001 has a pretty sweet intermission card with the (ligeti?) music playing over it

i saw Superman 2 with a friend and his family as a kid (having already seen it once in full thank god) and they made us go in half way through the film just as Lex is waving his white hankie at Zod in the White House. Then we watched 'til the end, sat through the rest of the 'programme' (trailers, a short film about solar energy etc) and then left just after Zod and Co start tearing up the place. Didn't understand it then, don't understand it now. But yeah i agree that it's become a meme that this happened.. but then i also was part of it happening!

That's grounds for arrest. Superman II is at the top of the heap for comic book movie sequels.

i don't understand the meme part

Not to mention that I don't wanna be there when Zod finds out you walked out of the movie.

Meme part was in response to
-

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.

― sites.younglife.org:8080 (history mayne), Tuesday, 15 June 2010 09:57 (Yesterday)
-

ah

if that's a meme so is the world series

but it's more said of the thirties than 1980

the meme part is not turning up whenever, which probably happened (though was definitely unusual in the extreme by 1980), but people later on saying that "turning up whenever" was better than the fascist, time-table-ist modern way of doing things. idk, none of the olds in my family thought it was a good way to see films, and people turning up halfway through was and is annoying as balls. though some of these same olds say that they always preferred the b-picture -- which is kind of a meme.

they sure loved memes. back then

no they didn't, that's just a meme

most ppl from the 30s-50s seem to recall it fondly when they recall it, but i guess that's more printable nostalgic than bitching abt it. i'm not sure abt individual start times in the bill being advertised routinely btw: i know Rank had to specifically try to get exhibitors in Britain to advertise start times for Henry V in 1944.

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, and just showed up and took their chances, staying round till when they came in (if they wanted to, man, if they cared about plots and all that mess). it's true that in most cinemas they'd let you stay in once you were there, but it just isn't true that people didn't know start-times.

xpost

you'd get programme start times back in the '20s, routinely. as with today, you could make a calculaish based on how long the main film was likely to be, etc., if you just wanted the main film. of course, there were many more suburban cinemas etc etc, and there's no really good sampling.

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

what the hell. why would anyone believe this.

it's fun

i don't think it's uninformed shit, it's abt moviegoing in the days of continuous programs, where a bill of newsreels, shorts, b feature and main feature would show on loop!

so ppl get programme start times & then in mayne's take they turn up at the start of the loop or calculate as opposed to "turning up in the middle"...they were turning up in the midde of something even if they were calculating abt likelihoods... so it's a reach calling the "took their chances" take on this moviegoing uninformed shit in contrast. u must really hate the postmodernists to be so dogmatic abt this minor grist to their mill.

it was a loop of a basically fixed length, with given start times, and a work-out-able time at which the main feature would begin. even modern cinemas (where i live) don't give the actual movie start-time. im saying that ppl who turned up 45 minutes into 'casablanca' and got their arses in everyone's face finding a seat would not have been super-popular.

there were (iirc) theatres that only really showed news, cartoons, shorts, etc: obviously they were different.

xpost

the literature is full of accounts of ppl & by ppl who just showed up in the middle, postmodernists weren't guessing based on the fact continuous programs existed.

think your olds were just the morbz of their day tbh, as was morbz obv

the literature isn't that full, and lol at the postmodernists using evidence n e way. i hear enough completely made-up garbage from non-philosophers. think of it practically: people back then weren't stupid, they enjoyed stories, etc. people did go late, sure, but in the main? it would have been a p lame experience once the feature film became a thing.

anyway:

brooklyn's finest: 132 fucking minutes

this is where i get all reactionary and say that a default position of opposition to business has rendered these "po mo academics" (if they exist in the way HM is describing them) unable to think straight.

why would film distributors and exhibitors be content with their public being totally ignorant of when shit was going to be on? it doesn't make any sense at all, from a business perspective.

i mean, fine, ppl went to a shitload more movies in the first half of the century and so showing up late or whatever was prob more common. but this implication that teh cinema used to be some kind of free zone of time-un-delimited viewer experience, and now is a rigid oppressive airport of kapitalist kontrol, eh, i'd need some more data to believe that.

lol xp

bored now

I remember thinking Bad Boys II should have tacked on 30 minutes of Will Smith rapping and gone full Bollywood. That's true of just about every blockbuster now.

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.

data doesn't matter. NO comedy/thriller/romance type movie that isn't some kind of visually stunning epic or intensely contemplative and/or suspenseful masterwork should EVER be over 120 minutes, and preferably not over 100 minutes. Whether there are more films like this than there used to be, all of them are too long.

otm

I bet that 90% of the films that check in at 150 minutes+ aspire to one or more of those things; how many actually achieve it, obviously many fewer.

This is actually a significant factor in my cinema going now. I refused to see Avatar because of the length. I always ask how long something is before agreeing to go unless it's a new Coen Bros or something on that level.

A four-hour Pauly Shore film? I'm guessing that's a pass for you.

# of very long movies (over 130 minutes), by decade:

1950s — 58
1960s — 121
1970s — 72
1980s — 55
1990s — 97
2000s — 112

# of very short movies (under 86 minutes), by decade:

1950s — 84
1960s — 48
1970s — 38
1980s — 26
1990s — 35
2000s — 13

(wanted to do a medium-length one for comparison purposes, but couldn't decide what range to use — there actually seem to be two separate frequency peaks within "medium-length", one in the mid-90s, another in the low 110s)

(all drawn from spacecadet's google spreadsheet data, in case that wasn't clear)

data doesn't matter. NO comedy/thriller/romance type movie that isn't some kind of visually stunning epic or intensely contemplative and/or suspenseful masterwork should EVER be over 120 minutes, and preferably not over 100 minutes. Whether there are more films like this than there used to be, all of them are too long.

― I can take a youtube that's seldom seen, flip it, now it's a meme (Hurting 2), Wednesday, December 29, 2010 5:13 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I bet that 90% of the films that check in at 150 minutes+ aspire to one or more of those things; how many actually achieve it, obviously many fewer.

― clemenza, Wednesday, December 29, 2010 5:18 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think the premise of this thread is that that's not true. 2.5 hour action movies and 2+ hour comedies that obviously don't aspire to much are not huge outliers any more.

I upped it to 150 minutes before making that statement--I see few action films, unless it's something like Inception or The Dark Knight, both of which obviously have artistic aspirations, whether you think they get there or not. But you might be right, I honestly don't know.

More action films without artistic aspirations plz

On the basis of those two, I'd agree. I'd still prefer the aspirations, though, in hopes of lucking onto something like the second Spiderman or Batman films, both of which I liked a lot.

Hurting rlly consistently a foole this week

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

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksk66thANP1qzsbs8.jpg

it was a well known gimmick of Hitch's, don't think i've seen that poster before tho

IIRC that gimmick was used with Psycho only, because it was advertised as a Janet Leigh movie, and Hitchcock was afraid that people turning in late might miss her part of the movie.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/dec/12/is-the-hobbit-too-long

it's amazing how they made the bold creative decision to make it into three movies. really makes me excited for the results.

169 minutes! holy Christ.

All too many other potentially great movies, from Titanic to Out of Africa

stopped reading here

haha

This IS 40; 133 minutes for a comedy.

John Cleese going with the 'people rocked up in the middle of the film then left where they came in' line, which some ilx folk are/were skeptical about

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ch4L2nrWMAE3FJ8.jpg

What's he on about - his "parents' generation"? We used to do this all the time when I was a kid. This is how I watched The Meaning of Life and Life of Brian.

A 1:45 cut of Civil War would be better.

minute 45, right?

bingo

Too many unneccesary trilogies.

So the new Avengers will be 3+ hours...

yeah

https://media.giphy.com/media/fDO2Nk0ImzvvW/giphy.gif

sex and the city 2 - 154 minutes
transformers 2 - ~150 minutes
karate kid - 139 minutes
funny people - ~150 minutes

why would you see any of these movies

the new Avengers will be 3+ hours...

why would you see any of these movies

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

Still no date on the Arbelos 4K restoration of Satantango. Criterion's 2K restoration of War and Peace drops June 25. Mysteries of Lisbon awaits on the stack, but I've discovered an affinity for horror in my greying years, that's been pushing the artsier stuff aside.

tbf war and peace is too long.

or at least not so great.

feel like theres a decent thread in here about overly long movies that were good but contained a long and ultimately unnecessary sideplot that could've been excised completely

Interstellar & the Matt Damon thing is a pretty good example

I bet that 90% of the films that check in at 150 minutes+ aspire to one or more of those things; how many actually achieve it, obviously many fewer.

― clemenza, Wednesday, December 29, 2010 12:18 PM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's just an application of Sturgeon's Law (85-90% of everything is crap). Presumably 100% of the filmmakers who attempt to make epic films are attempting to do so well, but maybe only 10% of the resulting films are good enough to be worth their running time.

I expect to see the forthcoming Avengers movie, but I wish filmmakers besides Tarantino would bring back intermissions. You'd think theater operators would welcome the second chance to sell overpriced concessions to moviegoers.

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