It can often be a problem with movies especially today as they seem to get longer. While there has always been movies that stretched the length that people could stand in the beginning of cinema, the more obvious being from the 30's to the 60's like Gone With The Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, and Cleopatra among others, there is always that struggle of making that time the viewer spends with the movie completely justified and with as little filler as possible. And today, most movies often fail at keeping the attention of the audience and while there are many factors that can cause this to happen, it leads one to wonder why it isn't as easy as it looks. There are three hour movies that seem to go by rather quickly and the average ninety minute affair that often has the feeling of being dragged at a snail's pace, but still there are moments in those longer movies that often feel like there could be something cut out of it. And today, if I don't bore you or seem like the amateur film critic I am in real life, I'll try and figure out how movies often feel like they are too long for their own good. Fair warning, I will only really discuss movies I am familiar with either by having watched it or researched enough beforehand.
First, let us start with the comedy genre and focus on some of the movies last year that I had the "honor" to watch. One such movie was The Internship, the Owen Wilson - Vince Vaughn vehicle about two watch salesmen who become interns at Google (if you want my thoughts on the movie itself, watch the first minute of this review {http://blip.tv/the-cinema-snob/midnight-screening-the-internship-6599654} or all of it. It pretty much sums up what my problems with it were). The movie itself is right at the cusp of being two hours long, but it feels like four. It can be said that comedies are the only genre of film where if the movie is incompetent, there is no enjoyment to be had at all. This movie is one of the prime examples of that principle. Part of this problem that is often apparent in modern comedies is the overindulgence of using improvised takes, where either what seems to be really laugh out loud funny at the time just seems like a big word salad of nonsense that just stops the flow of the movie. While I have no real problem with a reliance of dialogue to carry a film, it has to be done in the right way and the dialogue has to at least be interesting enough to keep the audience invested. With this dumb excuse of a movie, the reliance of unfunny jokes and improv as filler to fill in the bare bones plot which you realize is really idiotic not only makes the film just a chore to watch but makes the thing much longer than it needs to be.
The next movie that I have a ton of problems with and probably annoyed me to almost no end was Identity Thief, where not only the plot of the movie is completely unnecessary to begin with but it also brings up another issue with comedy films trying to make a movie longer: adding a subplot that takes up a good chunk of the story that ends up being dropped out of nowhere with no real resolution. In this movie, Jason Bateman's character tries to turn in the person who stole his identity and committed fraud with it. The idea itself could kind of work as a really black comedy but it is rather obvious from the look that it was never going to be that way, and the tone was a huge problem I had with it, as it is really stupid to make a story about making two people, one of whom nearly ruined the others' life, be on a buddy styled road trip and become friends. And then there is the subplot about how Melissa McCarthy's character owes money to a drug dealer who sends two hitmen after her, and added to that is a bounty hunter who is after her for missing a hearing. The subplot does come into play a few times, mainly with the bounty hunter almost catching her once or twice and the two groups do their best to get to her first, but for a long chunk of the movie they are not really involved with the story at hand. The main characters are not worried about them after a point, at least until the two leads get arrested for fraud (a classic example of what the fuck? questionable morals) and the hitmen catch up to them while the leads escape custody. And for a few seconds, they interact with one another again but this is short lived as the hitmen are arrested, never to be heard from again. In the end, that whole subplot served no purpose to the story or the humor so it was a completely unnecessary amount of filler put into a so called comedy to make it 111 minutes. Along with committing a terrible sin of wasting Robert Patrick and Jonathan Banks. Bringing the memory of that movie back makes me want to ignore talking about comedies now.
There is now kind of a jump with action films becoming overlong, as they try to make them at least two hours long to make fans feel like they got what they paid for. I could probably harp on the Transformers movie franchise for being completely over bloated as each film in the series so far has been around two and a half hours long and that would only be the tip of the iceberg but I feel like many people on the internet have already voiced their problems with it that it would become rather pointless to get into a tirade regarding it. But if there has to be something I could say about it that is relevant to the topic at hand, it is that the pacing is terrible. This mainly refers to the third acts of the movies, where they devolve into an hour long action scene with no break, making them become tired midway through. This is an expected problem with Michael Bay though, and I could quote a review for one his earlier films to kind of sum up how his action films work:
Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. "Armageddon" is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out. The review I just quoted I don't always agree with but this is kind of where the pacing issue really comes into play. I could point out another movie that is rather similar as it involves giant robots fighting would be Pacific Rim, that while is by no means a perfect film, is really fun and enjoyable while also being over two hours long (just barely though). I could also address how the characters in Pacific Rim, while they are kind of stock characters, at least work and aren't the scum of the earth like in Transformers but lets talk about their third acts.
We'll compare Dark of the Moon with Pacific Rim. With Dark of the Moon, the third act could begin sort of begin with the Autobots being supposedly dead after a BETRAYAL! by the Decepticons after they issued their rivals to be exiled from Earth. This leads to the conquest of Chicago and the remaining humans free from the tyranny to try and fight back, aided by the Autobots who somehow managed to avoid being killed off. And then the rest of the movie is just the battle, and it goes on forever. The action really does not stop as the scenes are pretty much moving from set piece A to set piece B to etc... and while they look good at times, the amount of stuff going on screen is a sensory overload that it is easy to get a headache rather easily. Now with Pacific Rim, I guess the third act could be at the start of the Hong Kong invasion of the Kaiju, as the Jaegers try to keep the city safe. This could be a near antithesis of what Transformers was doing, as the Hong Kong battle is only the start of the third act and doesn't take up the rest of the movie. Two of the Jaegers are defeated, leaving only Gypsy Danger and Striker Eureka remaining for the final assault to try and destroy the portal the kaiju are coming from. During that time, other stuff is going on to at least slow down the action, where it is the scientists who study the kaiju figuring out how they can gain access to the portal, the premature celebration followed by an immediate dispatch to finish the job, with a rather poignant scene regarding Herc and Chuck, the pilots of Eureka along with being father and son. It does surpass the generic characterization enough to make it noteworthy. And then the two remaining teams go and blow up the portal with only the Gypsy crew remaining. While Pacific Rim does have it's own problems regarding the pace as the third act is the first time any fighting happens since the first fifteen minutes of the film, it at least does a better job at making the time spent in between the fighting actually mean something.
The last paragraph might have seem a little fanboyish towards Pacific Rim as I really love the movie and for that I apologize if my opinion seemed to be favored towards one form of bias. But now the focus shall be put on the horror genre. Now for me, it is another genre that is hard to get right either due to having a good idea poorly executed or maybe even if there was no good idea and the movie was made in hopes of making a quick buck as is usually the case for most horror film sequels. That is more just a business practice in movies where the lower budget films are made in order to make enough money to fund the more ambitious productions. Before I get ahead of myself, I want to talk about how a movie with a solid concept can be brought down by bad execution along with being the type of movie we've seen before on many occasions and the easiest example of recent films would be The Purge. I actually like the idea of the film, about how for one night a year all crime is legal, and it would make a solid anthology focusing on different situations that arise during the night, either putting the attention on the victims or maybe the perpetrators. Unfortunately, the movie is nothing more than a run of the mill home invasion story, where a family is harassed by a group of people outside their house, wanting to get back someone that they were hunting. Part of the problem that makes this movie seem dragged out is the predictability of the plot, where the family struggles with whether or not to give the man back to them when it is obvious that there would be no movie if they decide to give him back. There is also the section of where the daughter's boyfriend tried to kill the father for whatever reason but it is rather hard to be invested in the family as there is a disjointed nature to how they are. The father works in home security so his home is built to the brim with security and it becomes illogical to a point on how people are able to break in in the first place. And due to the predictability of the plot, it's easy to fall into the beats of the story and even the supposed plot twist isn't all that surprising in the end. Horror films can come up with interesting concepts for movies as there can be some sort of unpredictability to what the story is, what the causes are, and other things but often it can be wasted in favor of something more simplistic.
And this shall be where part one will end. The next part will focus on dramatic movies and documentaries while trying to find more reasons why movies can feel longer than they really are. All the while, I'll try and put a more optimistic spin on it where longer movies that whose length for the most part is well deserved.
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