In Praise of the Long Movie
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The other masters of long, ornate liturgies are those of the Byzantine Rite (which is, I believe, how "byzantine" came to have its generic meaning.) Christian liturgy is musical theatre before musical theatre was a thing.
I could easily believe HN readers are religious at the same rate as the general population.
Catholics, Orthodox, and many Protestant denominations, as well as other world religions, have a rich tradition of studying the natural world objectively. Speaking to the Catholic intellectual tradition since that's the one that I know best, if our understanding of the Bible or Tradition disagrees with our understanding of natural science, then it's not necessarily our understanding of religion that's correct! As an example, while it's not technically dogmatic teaching either way, even though most Catholics used to be young Earth creationists the overwhelming majority now believe in an old Earth including the Popes[1].
[1] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/proofs-for-the-exis...
Oh? There isn't a divide?
> Catholics used to be young Earth creationists the overwhelming majority now believe in an old Earth
Hey! There's the divide, its about 300 years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
And if you feel like the divide is gone now:
abortion euthenasia contraceptives sexual orientation
However my experience has been that for those who are either natives to the US/West, or "gone native", there are disproportionally far more athiests in the tech industry than in the general population.
I would also say mentioning that you are Christian at a random tech company or tech conference is likely to be met with more wariness than mentioning you are Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist/other religion.
This is unsurprising to me. Most of those conferences (assuming you're talking about those which take place in American cities) will be attended primarily by people who grew up in a Christian culture (America). Many of such attendees who are atheists would still likely have been raised Christian and they're being wary of something they've rejected in the past. This is naturally compounded if it's true that "there are disproportionally far more athiests in the [US/Western] tech industry than in the general population."
Not to excuse or condemn, just explaining my perspective.
I say this as a Christian myself.
(Admittedly, I don't think every Christian believes in these physical manifestations but I've had conversations with some who do, which makes me believe it's common.)
I almost think it's accurate to call myself Christian in light of that but it muddies the understanding that other (actual) Christians have. Really, I would only call myself that to mess with the nice people with the ties and the name tags who knock on my door and don't listen the first time when I say, "No, thank you."
I know some in the "ex-Mormon" crowd and they... have stronger opinions of religion. I can imagine some rather extreme implementations of "wariness" (read: "outright disdain") from an American in their late 20s to early 30s when it comes to Christianity.
I say all of that to emphasize that it's not long because of a lack of pacing, but because there is a lot going on.
Sergei Bondarchuk also plays, quite movingly, the "central" role of Pierre, a representation of Tolstoy himself in the story. (His daughter stars in another of my favorite long movies, Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solyaris".)
Mosfilm has uploaded it on YouTube in four parts:
Part 1 https://youtu.be/bIij-KQ0jYU
Part 2 https://youtu.be/uJjqSfdFuUI
Part 3 https://youtu.be/wpKA1meiJzs
Part 4 https://youtu.be/nvDMu5e4xzw
It's awesome, and I hold out faint hope that some rich Hollywood film nerd will finish the trilogy, silent and in black and white.
It's that the financial constraints that previously existed, that would drive filmmakers to a tighter narrative, have been removed. And now there's little constraining the desire to turn in a 180+ minute opus.
Are there stories that need 3 hours, or that can justify that kind of length? Sure. But there's a whole lot of films being released that are far longer than they really need to be. JOHN WICK 4 is almost 3 hours long. That seems absurd. THE BATMAN was a fucking SLOG of a film, and absolutely did not have 3 hours of content. It badly needed editing.
You know who else needs editing? Scorsese. His later films, including and especially the ones called out in the linked article, are fat, fat, fat. No word of it a lie, I'm not sure he's made a film I liked in nearly 20 years.
The expression in popular usage definitely implies "someone to tell the auteur NO THIS IS TOO MUCH SIMPLIFY IT" or similar, which results in a tighter work.
This is a pattern we see in long-established novelists, for sure. They win awards or sell a ton, and their books get LONGER without getting BETTER. Stephen King is a great example.
The same thing is true of some filmmakers. No one is telling Marty his movies are too long. They should.
He's got an editor, he's got one of the best most respected editors in the game, she has been working with him for as long as he has been working. You disagreeing with her editing is, as objectively as anything can be in art: a you problem.
they don't say that at all actually
Either the editor is thinking the audience is too stupid, do they have to overexplain everything, or the editor is too stupid, or the director is too stupid. The third option being the most likely. And not even Asian directors are the best with bold cuts, African movies treating their audiences as the most clever. There's no need at all for lengthy introductions so that Aunty Karen will get it. Apparently Africans get it better than Asians, and esp. Americans.
Internal Affairs run 30m longer, even with extensive backstory cuts. Unfortunately I wrote my critic in German only, https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/the-departed/
You didn't like Silence (2016)?
Also hated (and could not finish) the utterly turgid THE IRISHMAN. WOLF OF WALL STREET had its moments, but I'm honestly not sure why the film existed -- I mean, it's the same sort of story as GOODFELLAS.
SHUTTER ISLAND was crap. THE DEPARTED was maybe ok. The last one I loved was THE AVIATOR.
Given how awful THE IRISHMAN was, and the trendline I see with his work, I have no plans to see the adaptation of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.
Box office response is hardly a barometer for anything. It can be a proxy for good, it can also be a proxy for marketing budgets (just look at how "successful" Marvel movies are, and they are the absolute worst types of movies).
>I'm also generally not a fan of religious films
Filtered. Absolutely plebeian take. I know it's uncool to be religious in tech circles/SV, but it shouldn't stop you from enjoying great cinema.
I watch a lot of made-for-TV staff on DVD and see a similarity – in football terms it's just time wasting. Long pauses usually filled in with music to give the illusion something is happening, sex scenes, gratuitous violence, people taking offence with unrealistic ease, longshots, slow shots... Anything to hide the fact that there is a lot of empty air. (Oh yes, and the three minute intro that also recaps what happened last time).
It all suggests there's a lot of tolerance for "something happening on screen" independent of whether it's worth watching or basically nothing at all.
This. I pretty much stopped watching all new shows made after 2015 or so (with Succession being the exception), as it feels like, during the TV shows gold rush, a lot of not very talented writers and directors got to make their own shows due to huge demand from the studios. In reality, making something many hours long and yet packed with actual interesting content is a Herculean task, so it feels like these untalented people are trying to steal any piece of time they can get, by every mean of stalling possible (sex, violence, "poignant" long shots etc.). It's almost like watching workers paid by the hour, and not by result.
Combine that with the fact that most movies and shows nowadays are targetting people who are at most 30 years old [1], and I'm really no longer interested.
[1] That's my theory anyway. Young people are the perfect audience - they have more free time and are significantly easier to impress with what is often in reality a poorly done rehash of things that worked in the great movies, shows or books of the past. They're still young enough to experience a given concept for the first time in their life, so they'll be moved by it. They're also significantly more susceptible to fads (don't belive their own taste as strongly, because it's not yet well developed), so it's much easier to manipulate them with marketing, paid reviews etc.
Also, Stranger Things does not even have that many sex scenes? There is like one or two per series and they are fairly mild.
After watching two series of it I could not discern any overall plot at all.
> therefore parents theory about binging marathons and collective attention deficit disorder is somehow wrong?
That's not what I was saying, and I was not disagreeing with him, and as I said, I upvoted his post. What I was saying was that to produce volume you may have to compromise heavily on other aspects.
> I do not even see what people should watch to not be adhd for you
I was not complaining about anybody else's viewing habits. People should watch what they want that entertains them. I was talking about my particular experience and wondered if it was shared by others. Seems that somebody agreed with me.
> Stranger Things does not even have that many sex scenes?
Like I said I watch other, contemporaneously made, things as well on DVD.
On its face, it's a sci-fi/horror film that contains a classic good vs evil fight against a monster. Within that, there's a pretty compelling narrative about the corruption of power, man's arrogant willfulness to play god, themes about fatherhood, family, the strength of love (romantic / platonic / familial,) the temptation of evil, nature vs nurture, and sacrifice.
On the whole though, the plot is more a vehicle for its themes, especially those centered around love, family, and the good and bad of humanity than your average murder mystery plot, but there are a handful of plots to pick from, and tbh, most of them are more worthwhile than the most obvious one, but it's hard to meaningfully categorize these stories as "empty air" however much they may not be _for you_.
I can only speak for myself and that's what I did. It bored me but if it worked for you that's great.
I haven't binge-watched a series in the 20 years since the one time I ruined "Twin Peaks".
One episode a day or one a week really is a good cadence.
But there is a lot of genuinely good stuff out there too. You just have to recognize mystery boxes and bail.
In short, "boring" bits when used skilfully are important, they help to set the expectations and amplify the subtleties. It's a bit like "dynamic range" for the plot: if there's no change in pace, everything becomes bland and boring. But also I do recommend watching that video essay, it's really good and goes much deeper than I can do in a short reply.
It's only solidly refuted if those aren't skipped to death, or "followed" while the person does 4 other things at the same time. And of course if those represent the main way content is consumed nowadays, and not like a mere small percentage of our consumption. And if the person doesn't watch them while still having the attention span of a goldfish, and e.g. missing any longer narrative threads...
I think the same applies to entertainment broadly: movies, podcasts, tv shows.
Instead I think that the real attention span is not consumer-based, but rather based on interaction with the subject matter. Simply put, I think the level of engagement with a material has to be on a certain level before you can claim it takes attention to consume it.
Yes, a Stranger Things season lasts 8 hours front-to-back, but if you zone out for an hour in between they're still looking for the alien mystery and they're not suddenly going to die because you didn't think along with all the plotpoints.
Contrast that with a university lecture, where if you zone out for 15 minutes you might never catch back up because you need to interact with the material in your head to be able to consume it properly.
I think that nuance is missing if you just say the words "attention span". "Attention" may just be the wrong word, and so I think nothing is really solidly refuted here, and I do indeed think that the attention span is dead.
> Contrast that with a university lecture, where if you zone out for 15 minutes you might never catch back up because you need to interact with the material in your head to be able to consume it properly.
Zoning out university lecture was extremely normal when I was studying over 20 years ago. You did not died either. You kept making notes in a zombie like state and then reread the notes later on. Or you checked textbook or you asked friend for notes. It would be pretty rare for your memory to be the only source of learning later on.
There was no need to understand and acquire the lecture content right at place during lecture. In all likelihood, there was never ever such need.
With big lectures I remember details about the lecturer more than the class material. The professor's style, tone, gravitas. Their anecdotes.
An important part of the package there really is about marshaling student attention. Getting out of the home, going to a dedicated place of learning with others, restraints on distraction. Similar issues affect WFH/remote. Or various other psycho-hacks like wearing special uniforms, daily rituals.
Perhaps ADD correlates with cultural looseness around all such formality.
I think it’s just really hard and rare to make great things and easier to make short, acceptable things that are successful to a lesser, but marginally acceptable level. I call this the “machine learning effect” as it’s regression to the mean and good enough, but not great. The most frequent place I see this is in Amazon recommendation engine where they don’t want you to buy a great book so much as they just want you to buy something, and a perfect transaction is where you only like the book enough not to return it and come back to buy another because you’re unsatisfied.
What’s neat is that there’s probably an ffmpeg script that if you just give me the clip times I can assemble from my own files.
(Am I correct that you, too, find the "yup, they're not in mordor, and they're increasingly miserable" scenes tedious?)
I love spending time with him on our home server, but trying to keep up with him is sometimes just as frustrating as helping him with math homework.
Attention disorders are about a deficiency in executive function, including a reduced ability to control one's attention (as opposed to just being a lack of attention). When disinterested, this leads to an inability to focus/concentrate. When it's something you like, this leads to "hyperfocus," whereby it's tough to pull away and behavior can be obsessive/addictive in nature. This latter symptom seems to receive less attention (edit: no pun intended :)). (And individuals and specifics differ.)
This is an oversimplification and I'm being a little loose with the vocabulary, but I wanted to at least briefly comment on the perceived "sketchiness" you mention.
AIUI, this is a very common but false belief; it is in part based on hyperfocus being a common feature of ADHD, but hyperfocus on something isn’t (though its often mistaken for) liking it. (It’s also probably based in part on “activities” that are themselves tolerant of lack of consistent focus and task switching.)
Both of those things work because people do other stuff while listening/watching. There are very, very, very few 12+ hour streaming-series "movies" that are improved by paying close attention the entire time, even if you split the watch into two or three sessions—most are better if you check out from time to time, talk to someone, go to the other room to do the dishes, mess around on your phone, play some Switch, whatever.
I've yet to read "In Praise Of The Long New Yorker Article".
I also think there are two kinds of audience, in a sort of bimodal distribution. Some people are looking to pass the time. As long as you display some nice images, they're happy. They don't mind that the episodes of Stranger Things have got longer, because that's what they're spending their time with. At the other end you have people who constantly feel an awareness of what they could be doing with their time, and once they feel that a filmmaker is wasting it you've lost them.
(Last night's film was, in honor of the death of Harry Belafonte, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh_and_the_D... ; much of it is just beautiful long shots of empty New York, and the character parts make heavy use of awkward pauses or unspoken conversations, and yet it's captivating. I suppose I should warn modern audiences that it's also unremittingly ""woke"", and even more so by 1959 standards)
If you're at home, sure, you can pause it whenever. But even then it'd be nice to have a point where the movie explicitly pauses and says "hey things are about to get crazy, go pee".
Most Indian regional language and Bollywood Hindi films (even the modern ones) run around 2h30m to 2h40m. The older films were even longer.
RRR, the Indian film that captured a lot of viewership around the globe had a runtime of 3h2m.
Most screenwriters and filmmakers in India design around the Interval-block to place a major plot-point just before the interval card is shown.
It is funny that recent Hollywood movies don't come with that. And even when a film is 2h+ long. Indian movie theatres just forcibly introduce a break in Hollywood films so that they can send people to the concession stands and restrooms. Sometimes, this happens mid-dialogue it is funny (and irritating at times).
Is this still the case? It's been probably over 10 years since I saw a movie in an Indian theater, so my memory is hazy.
Recent films that I can remember: John Wick 4, Top Gun: Maverick, NOPE.
All of them had the forced break.
It was a cultural adjustment for me with American theaters and no intermissions, even for the very long films. Funnily enough, since I went to a couple of Broadway shows before the movie theater, I was primed to expect an intermission in the movie theater as well, at least for some movies. What I do note is that the audience is consequently more prone to walk out to restrooms and concession stands at any time during the movie, which can be annoying.
They're awful in cinemas tho. I just don't go watch them there.
Pop songs are longer, too. It used to be nothing over 3 minutes had a chance of getting airplay, but a few brave artists broke that barrier. Now everyone thinks they're David Byrne.
There's artistic expression made better by constraints and ruthless editing, and then there's mindless self-indulgence. Usually you're going to end up in one of those camps, unless you're a lot more talented than most of your audience thinks.
For a point of reference, Schrader has produced a famous diagram where he identifies acclaimed filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Akerman (mentioned in article), Weerasetakul, Tarr as practitioners of slow cinema[1].
[1] https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/figure1...
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Personally, these long films were an experience in themselves:
- Sátántangó, Bela Tarr, 7 hours 18 min
Tarr depicts the countryside as a slow, humdrum experience. By confronting viewers with the elongated pedestrian experiences, the film accentuates the subtle rhythms in everyday life.
- Hitler: A Film from Germany, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 7 hours 22 min
Perhaps bombastic, and even pretentious, but Syberberg has successfully constructed his own world from his poetic sentiments. It laments on how the once-noble "Germanism" has been (as put by Susan Sontag) "retroactively tainted" by Hitler.
- Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky, 2 hours 5 min
I know this isn't as long as the other titles, but the penultimate shot of the film is 10 minutes long. It depicts a man walking around holding a candle. While very little happens, the parsimony of the shot directs the audience's attention to the sparse movements, which compounds the until the action is resolved.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn is also great. The movie itself isn't very long, but the long shots are pure slow cinema, stillness made into an aesthetic sublime.
For a time, arcades were the only way to experience video games, just as cinemas were for films, and, at least through the early 90's, they were still by far the best way to experience most AAA titles like Street Fighter 2, etc.
But game companies wanted more profit than just arcades could bring in, so we got the advent of the home console.
For a time, the arcade technology was still clearly superior to the home console technology, but home consoles quickly eclipsed what the arcades could do,and simultaneously changed the medium massively, allowing us games like RPGs, which had multi-hour-long very immersive and deep gameplay and storytelling that was simply not possible on a cabinet designed to get as many people in and out of it as quickly possible.
In the late 90's, we had games like Final Fantasy 7, something so far removed from the original concept of an arcade game it could only have ever existed as an in-home experience.
What can we learn from the closure of arcades in relation to the fall of theatres?
The experience of media has to be better than what is offered in our homes, to get us to leave them. Cinema has practically passed that tipping point already, especially to anyone with a decent home video/audio system, which is more insanely affordable than ever.
I predict cinemas will, in the next couple decades, very much go the way of arcades - including a small resurgence of 'real', independently-owned cinemas that will exist to give us that nostalgia-laced experience that will be indie enough at the time to be considered hip and retro.
Seriously, going to Avatar 2 was a nightmare I think for half the people who saw it because after 1 1/2 hours, your popcorn and drink are empty, your butt is starting to hurt and you need to pee from all that soda you just drank. This is just basic biology.
Not only that, but a 10-15 break in the film provides another opportunity for concession sales, a massive positive for the cinema, and certainly one that could compensate for any schedule readjustments they may have to do.
I simply can't see a negative to an intermission, for either the cinema's profits or for the customer's enjoyment of the experience.
The lack of intermission makes going to the cinema for films of this length a net negative, especially with how much it costs.
I think Avatar 2 may be the last film longer than 2 hours I actually bother to pay to see in the cinema.
I'd describe the experience, especially with the awful, strange and distracting as hell frame rate jumps Avatar decided it needed, as more uncomfortable than enjoyable.
I honestly wish I'd waited and just watched it from home on my 4K TV snuggled with a partner, lol.
We can sit up, pause, move around, snuggle with a lover, we can just run and take a piss if we need without worrying about missing a critical scene, or watch it in two parts if we're feeling tired and want to catch the rest the next day.
My partner and I are also not out a combined $50 and we got to share a bottle of wine at home while we watch the movie on my 4K TV. No transit, either. We can just roll over and pass out if we want.
Cinema has a problem if it continues to stubbornly refuse to implement intermissions in films 2:30+. I'm just so over it.
Historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hurr, The Ten Commandments and Spartacus immediately come to mind. Their length adds to their "epic" character.
I can think of plenty of films that are overlong and suffer for it too of course. A recent example is the Danish film Godland. There were people literally asleep by the end of that one in the cinema showing I attended. I wished I could have done the same.
There have always been long movies, but it used to be that there was a purpose, to create an epic. Now we get romantic comedies drawn out to a 2:30 runtime.
I recently watched Game Night (2018) which was hilarious, before that I'm reaching back to Tropic Thunder and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (both 2008 IIRC). I'm sure there are more, but it feels as if they've really fallen off.
From that point of view it doesn't really matter how long a movie is.
The length of a movie becomes important if it's boring as hell, but then again: I can just stop watching (forced school movies are a time of the, long gone, past for me after all ;D)
Make the work irreducible.
But it totally depends on why you need a piece of media (or even art).
At the most extreme end, your runtime is fixed. Eg a specific song in a musical might have to last a certain minimum time, so that the crew in the background can quickly change the set.
Or think of background music in a game, or even in a bar. They have to be on for as long as it takes, and shouldn't loop too often.
Totally blown opportunity there.
"What's your favourite thing about this movie?" "That it's exactly ninety minutes long."
With the 'long' coming at the precise moment the runtime tips over from 1:29:59.