narrows101
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Gosh I remember the days of double features but now apparently no one can sit through a movie longer than two hours.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1802459,00.html#article_continue
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Are you sitting comfortably?[/FONT][FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
Blockbuster season is upon us - cue lots of long films. Peter Bradshaw wonders what happened to the cutting room
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Peter Bradshaw
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Wednesday June 21, 2006
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Guardian
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Do films really have to be so long? Just recently we have seen some whoppers. The Da Vinci Code was a pitiless two-and-a-half hours. Surely a few minutes could have been clipped here or there. Last year we had the indecently long King Kong, while next month sees the release of Les Amants Reguliers, a rambling 178 minutes of Nouvelle Vaguery. Michael Mann's Miami Vice is 146 minutes long, and Superman Returns even longer. One of my favourite ever films, Abel Ferrara's comic-horror masterpiece The Addiction, is actually fewer than 80 minutes.[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]I remember the first time I sat down to watch The Travelling Players, a 1974 film by Greek arthouse master Theo Angelopoulos, who specialises in lengthy, slow-moving pictures. The running time said: 230 minutes, and my first thought was: wow, two hours 30 minutes - gosh, that is long! Then the full, awesome truth hit me.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The vast number of films in differing categories, and with wildly different releases and audience masses, makes screen-time averages all but meaningless. But King Kong is certainly a case in point: at three hours, Peter Jackson's film was almost twice as long as the 1933 original, made at a time when movies were shorter because they had to fit either side of a double-bill - that quaint cinema tradition that has vanished from all but the most rarefied showings.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]One reason why films are conceived at this gargantuan size is that this is supposed to be an integral part of the "event movie" experience - and event movies like Lord of the Rings are supposed to have that extra special something that tempts people away from their giant plasma screens and home cinema systems. Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music - they were all event movies of three hours plus, which, when the lights went up afterwards, left you with the feeling of achievement in simply getting through it. It was a lighter, more digestible sense of triumph than Bayreuth regulars have from getting stuck into the Ring cycle. And at well over three hours, the monumentally lucrative Titanic was the event movie that set a new pace.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]But why should the industry tolerate long films, which presumably mean fewer ticket sales? Industry observers note that the preponderance of multiplex theatres means this is not so much of a problem these days: they can schedule the same movie in different screens with staggered start times. Others note darkly that with the studios being owned by infotainment conglomerates, there are lots of product-placement ads to shoehorn in and songs to boost soundtrack record sales. And for Bollywood, long movies have always been seen as value for money.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]But for modern Hollywood, a lot of it is down to ego. The bigger the film, the bigger the clout: the sheer conspicuous power that the producer and director must have to unload such a long movie. The primal scene in movie history is an anecdote recalled by Hollywood mogul Robert Evans, who sat down to a first screening of The Godfather, and was outraged to find it was only two hours and six minutes. He wanted grandeur; he wanted epic. Evans yelled at Coppola: "Schmuck! You shortchanged yourself. What studio head tells a director to make a picture longer? Only a nut like me. You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie."
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Harvey Weinstein was the heir to Evans's attitude in allowing Quentin Tarantino to extend Kill Bill into a two-part movie. Directors like long films, and producers can occasionally be persuaded that tolerating and even encouraging long films is a sign of their own machismo-patronage. Despite our eroding attention span, the three-hour film is here to stay.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The long list
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The Da Vinci Code (2006) dir. Ron Howard[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 149 minutes[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? Either 419 minutes or maybe 941 minutes. The number of minutes of the running time is an occult numerological anagram indicating where Jesus stayed when he lived at Glastonbury. It's all explained on the DVD, apparently.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? Tom Hanks is a handsome art scholar who, with glam sidekick Audrey Tautou, stumbles upon a plot by the Vatican sect Opus Dei to suppress a terrifying truth about Jesus Christ and his relationship with Mary Magdalene, which is encoded in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Frankly, the whole of the final section in Scotland, after the twinkly Brit scholar Sir Leigh Teabing (played by Ian McKellen) is arrested. That would lose you 30-40 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Three inert buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]King Kong (2005) dir. Peter Jackson[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 187 minutes[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 127 minutes. The brilliant final hour, showing King Kong's last stand atop the Empire State Building, goes by so quickly that it doesn't figure in the calculation. The rest of it, it has to be said, does seem pretty lengthy, and the whole thing is twice as long as the first Kong.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? A crazy film-maker journeys to a far-off island with his leading lady Ann Darrow hoping to use its legendary beasts in a movie. There he chances upon Kong who falls in love with Ann. The monster is captured and brought back to New York.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Some might say the bit where everyone falls into a pit of giant insects, a scene cut from the 1933 original. The chasing around after T-Rex might have you clicking on your mobile to read the time.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? One insensate buttock out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Dances With Wolves (1990) dir. Kevin Costner[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 236 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 236 years. Costner's epic western, re-released in a director's cut of almost four hours after its multi-Oscared triumph, was hugely revered. It still looks handsomely photographed but is exposed on the small screen, perhaps by the sheer mind-bending, hogwhimpering length.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? During the American civil war, a Union soldier, played by Costner, is posted to the western frontier, accompanied by a horse and a wolf. He befriends the Sioux and Pawnee tribes, falls in love with a white woman brought up as a Native American and is named "Dances With Wolves".[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Costner takes a long hike with medicine man Kicking Bird that could have been chopped - and was, before Costner put it back in for the long version. His moustache could have been pruned.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Four unfeeling buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Gone With the Wind (1939) dir. Victor Fleming[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 238 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 238 minutes. Gone With the Wind perfectly inhabits the epic form. At the end of it all, sated and happy, you know you've been on the receiving end of a substantial film.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? Scarlett O'Hara is a petulant and spoilt belle in the days of the Old South; she nurses a sentimental love for high-minded gentleman Ashley Wilkes, who is already engaged. She also catches the eye of rascal Rhett Butler. As the civil war destroys the south, Scarlett defiantly survives.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Wash your mouth out. But if you insist, we could possibly lose the "overture" musical passage at the beginning, or Butler's surreal sojourn in London, with a painted Palace of Westminster sighted through the window in one scene.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Two pulverised buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Sleep (1963) dir. Andy Warhol[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 321 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 320 minutes. I think I dozed off for a minute.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? It's a film of a man asleep for five hours and 21 minutes. That's not much of a night's sleep. So perhaps it's a bit rushed. During one of the first performances, a member of the audience ran to the screen and screamed "Wake up!"[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? There's a closeup of the sleeping man's abdomen, expanding and contracting, which slows things down a bit.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Five traumatised buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Greed (1925) dir. Erich Von Stroheim[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 540 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? Difficult to say, as only a handful of people ever saw the uncut version of the silent epic, and none of them are still alive. It was a screening for the director and executives, beginning at 10am and finishing after 7pm, with Von Stroheim not permitting lunch or bathroom breaks. For most of the suits, the question of it being "bum-numbing" was academic; it was as if each of their bodies had been turned into an enormous inert arse.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? A quack dentist gets engaged to a young woman. When she wins $5,000 her ex-boyfriend demands a share; on being rebuffed, he tries to expose the dentist.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? What a tactless question. When his masterpiece was hacked down to two hours by the studio, Von Stroheim first wept and then punched mogul Louis B Mayer. Most of the remaining seven hours of film was destroyed, but the bastardised two-hour version was still hailed as a masterpiece. A four-hour version was cobbled together later, but it wasn't the same.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Six annihilated buttocks out of five ·[/FONT]
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1802459,00.html#article_continue
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Are you sitting comfortably?[/FONT][FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
Blockbuster season is upon us - cue lots of long films. Peter Bradshaw wonders what happened to the cutting room
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Peter Bradshaw
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Wednesday June 21, 2006
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Guardian
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Do films really have to be so long? Just recently we have seen some whoppers. The Da Vinci Code was a pitiless two-and-a-half hours. Surely a few minutes could have been clipped here or there. Last year we had the indecently long King Kong, while next month sees the release of Les Amants Reguliers, a rambling 178 minutes of Nouvelle Vaguery. Michael Mann's Miami Vice is 146 minutes long, and Superman Returns even longer. One of my favourite ever films, Abel Ferrara's comic-horror masterpiece The Addiction, is actually fewer than 80 minutes.[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]I remember the first time I sat down to watch The Travelling Players, a 1974 film by Greek arthouse master Theo Angelopoulos, who specialises in lengthy, slow-moving pictures. The running time said: 230 minutes, and my first thought was: wow, two hours 30 minutes - gosh, that is long! Then the full, awesome truth hit me.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The vast number of films in differing categories, and with wildly different releases and audience masses, makes screen-time averages all but meaningless. But King Kong is certainly a case in point: at three hours, Peter Jackson's film was almost twice as long as the 1933 original, made at a time when movies were shorter because they had to fit either side of a double-bill - that quaint cinema tradition that has vanished from all but the most rarefied showings.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]One reason why films are conceived at this gargantuan size is that this is supposed to be an integral part of the "event movie" experience - and event movies like Lord of the Rings are supposed to have that extra special something that tempts people away from their giant plasma screens and home cinema systems. Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music - they were all event movies of three hours plus, which, when the lights went up afterwards, left you with the feeling of achievement in simply getting through it. It was a lighter, more digestible sense of triumph than Bayreuth regulars have from getting stuck into the Ring cycle. And at well over three hours, the monumentally lucrative Titanic was the event movie that set a new pace.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]But why should the industry tolerate long films, which presumably mean fewer ticket sales? Industry observers note that the preponderance of multiplex theatres means this is not so much of a problem these days: they can schedule the same movie in different screens with staggered start times. Others note darkly that with the studios being owned by infotainment conglomerates, there are lots of product-placement ads to shoehorn in and songs to boost soundtrack record sales. And for Bollywood, long movies have always been seen as value for money.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]But for modern Hollywood, a lot of it is down to ego. The bigger the film, the bigger the clout: the sheer conspicuous power that the producer and director must have to unload such a long movie. The primal scene in movie history is an anecdote recalled by Hollywood mogul Robert Evans, who sat down to a first screening of The Godfather, and was outraged to find it was only two hours and six minutes. He wanted grandeur; he wanted epic. Evans yelled at Coppola: "Schmuck! You shortchanged yourself. What studio head tells a director to make a picture longer? Only a nut like me. You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie."
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Harvey Weinstein was the heir to Evans's attitude in allowing Quentin Tarantino to extend Kill Bill into a two-part movie. Directors like long films, and producers can occasionally be persuaded that tolerating and even encouraging long films is a sign of their own machismo-patronage. Despite our eroding attention span, the three-hour film is here to stay.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The long list
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The Da Vinci Code (2006) dir. Ron Howard[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 149 minutes[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? Either 419 minutes or maybe 941 minutes. The number of minutes of the running time is an occult numerological anagram indicating where Jesus stayed when he lived at Glastonbury. It's all explained on the DVD, apparently.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? Tom Hanks is a handsome art scholar who, with glam sidekick Audrey Tautou, stumbles upon a plot by the Vatican sect Opus Dei to suppress a terrifying truth about Jesus Christ and his relationship with Mary Magdalene, which is encoded in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Frankly, the whole of the final section in Scotland, after the twinkly Brit scholar Sir Leigh Teabing (played by Ian McKellen) is arrested. That would lose you 30-40 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Three inert buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]King Kong (2005) dir. Peter Jackson[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 187 minutes[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 127 minutes. The brilliant final hour, showing King Kong's last stand atop the Empire State Building, goes by so quickly that it doesn't figure in the calculation. The rest of it, it has to be said, does seem pretty lengthy, and the whole thing is twice as long as the first Kong.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? A crazy film-maker journeys to a far-off island with his leading lady Ann Darrow hoping to use its legendary beasts in a movie. There he chances upon Kong who falls in love with Ann. The monster is captured and brought back to New York.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Some might say the bit where everyone falls into a pit of giant insects, a scene cut from the 1933 original. The chasing around after T-Rex might have you clicking on your mobile to read the time.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? One insensate buttock out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Dances With Wolves (1990) dir. Kevin Costner[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 236 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 236 years. Costner's epic western, re-released in a director's cut of almost four hours after its multi-Oscared triumph, was hugely revered. It still looks handsomely photographed but is exposed on the small screen, perhaps by the sheer mind-bending, hogwhimpering length.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? During the American civil war, a Union soldier, played by Costner, is posted to the western frontier, accompanied by a horse and a wolf. He befriends the Sioux and Pawnee tribes, falls in love with a white woman brought up as a Native American and is named "Dances With Wolves".[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Costner takes a long hike with medicine man Kicking Bird that could have been chopped - and was, before Costner put it back in for the long version. His moustache could have been pruned.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Four unfeeling buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Gone With the Wind (1939) dir. Victor Fleming[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 238 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 238 minutes. Gone With the Wind perfectly inhabits the epic form. At the end of it all, sated and happy, you know you've been on the receiving end of a substantial film.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? Scarlett O'Hara is a petulant and spoilt belle in the days of the Old South; she nurses a sentimental love for high-minded gentleman Ashley Wilkes, who is already engaged. She also catches the eye of rascal Rhett Butler. As the civil war destroys the south, Scarlett defiantly survives.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? Wash your mouth out. But if you insist, we could possibly lose the "overture" musical passage at the beginning, or Butler's surreal sojourn in London, with a painted Palace of Westminster sighted through the window in one scene.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Two pulverised buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Sleep (1963) dir. Andy Warhol[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 321 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? 320 minutes. I think I dozed off for a minute.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? It's a film of a man asleep for five hours and 21 minutes. That's not much of a night's sleep. So perhaps it's a bit rushed. During one of the first performances, a member of the audience ran to the screen and screamed "Wake up!"[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? There's a closeup of the sleeping man's abdomen, expanding and contracting, which slows things down a bit.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Five traumatised buttocks out of five.
[/FONT] [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Greed (1925) dir. Erich Von Stroheim[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long is it? 540 minutes.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]How long does it feel? Difficult to say, as only a handful of people ever saw the uncut version of the silent epic, and none of them are still alive. It was a screening for the director and executives, beginning at 10am and finishing after 7pm, with Von Stroheim not permitting lunch or bathroom breaks. For most of the suits, the question of it being "bum-numbing" was academic; it was as if each of their bodies had been turned into an enormous inert arse.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]What's it about? A quack dentist gets engaged to a young woman. When she wins $5,000 her ex-boyfriend demands a share; on being rebuffed, he tries to expose the dentist.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Anything we could have lived without? What a tactless question. When his masterpiece was hacked down to two hours by the studio, Von Stroheim first wept and then punched mogul Louis B Mayer. Most of the remaining seven hours of film was destroyed, but the bastardised two-hour version was still hailed as a masterpiece. A four-hour version was cobbled together later, but it wasn't the same.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Bum-numbing factor? Six annihilated buttocks out of five ·[/FONT]
