movies

[Jocephus]

Take the TSPDT full list of 1000 and sort by run time. Look at everything running three hours or longer. How many of those films can you honestly say LOTR or Titanic is in a class with? If you sort the list by ranking, you don't find a lot of movies over 135 minutes toward the top, except several Coppolas, Fellini, Antonioni, Kubrick, Ozu, names like that. Master filmmakers who can fill 2.5 or more hours of your time without wasting a bit of it. Jackson and Cameron fill your time and produce some nice spectacle but they waste a lot of film and money and time on stuff that's just meaningless spectacle.

I don't even know what to do with this. Why are we arbitrarily sorting by run times? As a yardstick for epicness or something? I don't care if something is supposedly an epic or not. Just because you run over 2.5 hours doesn't mean you get judged a different way. It's not a list of epic films, it's a list of films.

this is random, but im reminded...ebert has a funny retort when letterman mentions malcolm x's time length, around the 1:50 mark

[33anda3rd]

Just because you run over 2.5 hours doesn't mean you get judged a different way.

If your movie is over 2.5 hours it god damn better not have any filler. And it's not judged different, it's judged the same. Watch Pootie Tang. You can see where Louis CK put extra stuff it to get it, barely at 81 min, to feature length. It's funny stuff. But it's noticeably filler. He and Jackson are judged THE SAME. It's just Louie isn't making you sit through 2.5 hours that is 20% filler. His filler is less painful because of its length.

[33anda3rd]

If Taxi Driver had never been made, and Schoeder was shopping the script now, he'd never sell it to a studio. They'd avoid him like the plague.

You realize you're supporting my point with that example right?

Nightcrawler was produced by Bold Films and distributed theatrically by Open Road Films. It got a tax credit from the state of California for almost a third of its tiny budget. Taxi Driver was produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Also, Nightcrawler is creepy and features a sociopath. But it aint Taxi Driver.

[JL21]

this is random, but im reminded...ebert has a funny retort when letterman mentions malcolm x's time length, around the 1:50 mark

That's an awesome answer.

[33anda3rd]

Lord of the Rings on the other hand - I was pretty pumped about them when they came out, so I know a good bit about them. Jackson was a driving force behind getting those made and it's pretty well known to have been a labor of love for him. He worked on getting it going back as far as 95 or so. The Hobbiton set had flowers planted on it a full year before they filmed anything there. The costume and props team spent about the same amount of time preparing in advance of filming. There's CG, but there's also a lot of full scale set construction and forced perspective, and other old school camera tricks. Having said that, CG can accomplish in many cases the same things as a real set in many ways so if it's effective that's not really a knock on it.

I'll leave alone the cribbing from fantasy/teen sources, except to say these are pretty dense books loved by adults for decades. While we're on the source material, about 90-95% of what's in the movies comes directly from the books. To the extent there's bloat it's attributable to that, or perhaps Jackson's unwillingness to cut more. But he set out to film the books, so it's there to take or leave. I think it's fully intended to be a piece of art as well as entertainment. Accessible, mainstream art for sure, but sincerely intentioned, at least as much as something like Jaws, ET or Star Wars.

We're not going to agree, and that's ok, I'm not going to try to convince you or change your taste, which really is what this is about. My tastes are decidedly not skewed toward sci-fi/fantasy. I didn't know anything about LOTR going in and coming out what I know is it's not for me.

As far as "to the extent there's bloat it's attributable to (the book), or perhaps Jackson's unwillingness to cut more." I disagree with the first half. There are plenty of films based on books--big books--that come in at a run time way under nine hours. The original Star Wars trilogy is over three hours shorter than the LOTR trilogy. I agree with the second half--Jackson was unwilling to cut anything. He's not at this stage good enough as a filmmaker to tell the story in less time--and you certainly can tell that story in less time. You might get fewer set pieces, fewer chances for overacting, but you can still convey the idea and feeling of the story. Instead he does the opposite. Here's a 3 hour movie. Oh, you want more? Here's a 3.5 hour extended cut. Oh, you want more? Here's a four-hour blu-ray cut. A great director is a great editor and knows when to harness himself. Jackson's just a hack who got a ton of money for filming a popular fantasy book. Which is sad because to get back to the original point: Heavenly Creatures is phenomenal.

[ghostrunner]

Just because you run over 2.5 hours doesn't mean you get judged a different way.

If your movie is over 2.5 hours it god damn better not have any filler. And it's not judged different, it's judged the same. Watch Pootie Tang. You can see where Louis CK put extra stuff it to get it, barely at 81 min, to feature length. It's funny stuff. But it's noticeably filler. He and Jackson are judged THE SAME. It's just Louie isn't making you sit through 2.5 hours that is 20% filler. His filler is less painful because of its length.

So what in LOTR is filler, based on your one hour of Fellowship of the Ring? The only thing I can recall might be battles, and I'll concede that Two Towers' big battle scene carries on at least ten minutes too long. Fellowship is pretty much solid story front to back, and not coincidentally it's the best of the three. ROTK has too many endings, but it's all new information. It's just too much after you feel it should have wrapped up already. I'm not sure it counts as filler.

I don't want to hold up TSPDT as the authority. I just heard about it on here the other day, but it's an aggregate of critical /filmmaker opinion and it has Fellowship on its 21st century and all time lists. Fellowship is 50th on AFI's top 100 of all time. That's crazy, but obviously it has a strong amount of positive critical opinion behind it. If there was as much filler as you're making it out to have, I don't think it would be on any of those.

[33anda3rd]

I eventually saw all three of them. After the third one won Best Picture and people were still salivating over how awesome they were. I was bored for the majority of the time.

Let's let them get older and we'll see what the critical consensus is. L'Avventura was really high on the Sight & Sound poll in the 70s. Debuted at #2 in 1962. Then #5 in 1972. Then #7 in 1982. Now it's #21. There are only 2 movies in the top 10 now that were made later--2001 and 8 1/2--so it's not like new stuff bumped it down, just people's excitement over the modernizing impact L'Avventura had died down. People's excitement over a classic fantasy tale being told in epic overblown proportions by a hack director will die down too.

Ultimately (and I say this without having read the book) what's probably the best parts of LOTR is what came from the book, not from Peter Jackson.

[The Third Man]

You realize you're supporting my point with that example right?

Nightcrawler was produced by Bold Films and distributed theatrically by Open Road Films. It got a tax credit from the state of California for almost a third of its tiny budget. Taxi Driver was produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Also, Nightcrawler is creepy and features a sociopath. But it aint Taxi Driver.

Wait, why do we care who's producing the films if they're getting produced?

And Taxi Driver's budget was tiny too.

[IMADreamer]

Speaking of long movies. We saw Unbroken last night. While it was a good movie, one of the few where people clapped at the end, it was very long. There were a number of scenes that could have been cut, and certainly parts that should have been shortened. Still it was good, but maybe a watch on your couch good, vs the theater.

[The Third Man]

Like, yeah, the middle-budget film is getting squeezed out these days but it ain't permanent. And it's not because studios are any more or less concerned with money. They just happen to be more concerned with safety because that's what happens to be profitable right now. It'll change. Spielberg has been calling for the bursting of the blockbuster franchise bubble for a while now, and if anybody would know it's him.