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OT: Cloud Atlas trailer
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[Andy Neil] “I have seen it. They did a preview screening (unfinished). I was completely blown away. It’s an amazing film. “
Glad to hear it!
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[Craig Shields] “Really?! 3:45? I don’t think I could sit through it and I love movies.
“Stay away from Lawrence of Arabia then. Almost exactly the same length. And, one of the greatest films ever made.
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This trailer is just fantastic. I’ll see the film based on the trailer and the cast alone. Thanks for sharing, Chris.
Shawn
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[Chris Harlan] “Stay away from Lawrence of Arabia then. Almost exactly the same length. And, one of the greatest films ever made.”
Yes, absolutely.
Prince Feisal: With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.
T.E. Lawrence: My friends, we have been foolish. Auda will not come to Aqaba. Not for money…
Auda abu Tayi: No.
T.E. Lawrence: …for Feisal…
Auda abu Tayi: No!
T.E. Lawrence: …nor to drive away the Turks. He will come… because it is his pleasure.
[pause]
Auda abu Tayi: Thy mother mated with a scorpion.And I wish there was a way to quote the look of a lone camel and rider approaching a well across the dessert shot with a super long lens while the heat waves rise and warp the image.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
So where would you draw the line then on whether you would go see a movie or not? 4hrs? 5,6hrs? Because I do agree with a point that was made earlier that a movie not feeling like a long movie. Inception felt like a long movie to me. So if they said that this movie was 5:45 would you still be excited to go see it?
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[Craig Shields] “if they said that this movie was 5:45 would you still be excited to go see it?”
at 5:45 they would break it into 2 movies. I don’t know of any theatrical feature that is longer than 4 hours. The Sorrow and the Pity is a Documentary and comes in at 4:11 and only Woody Allen has probably ever sat thru the whole thing. On the other hand if they wanted to release The Wire as a feature, all 60 hours of it, as long as they fed me and stopped for bathroom breaks I would be waiting on line.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
He likes your lemonade.
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[Herb Sevush] ” I don’t know of any theatrical feature that is longer than 4 hours.”
Herb,
It’ll hinge on what you consider a “theatrical feature”, but Our Hitler (Syberberg) is the first that comes to mind … over 7 hours. It received a small theatrical run in some American centres after it premiered, I think.
Edit: I should probably mention Shoah (Claude Lanzmann) as well (Edit, already mentioned above), over 10 hours originally, though I don’t know of its distribution history..
A couple of other long docs come to mind as well.
Franz.
(Did I just Godwin this thread?)
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[Craig Shields] “So where would you draw the line then on whether you would go see a movie or not? 4hrs? 5,6hrs? Because I do agree with a point that was made earlier that a movie not feeling like a long movie. Inception felt like a long movie to me. So if they said that this movie was 5:45 would you still be excited to go see it?
“I really wouldn’t think about it one way or another. In terms of pure film esthetics, the viability of the content is what sets the viability of the running time. One of the more searing experiences I’ve ever had as a viewer was watching the 1985 documentary Shoah, which sports a 9.5 hr runtime. I tend to think of Lord of the Rings as a single movie broken into three parts, and someday hope to experience it in a theatre exactly that way.
A movie’s length is most often based on what is optimal for distribution, especially in the last thirty years. A 90ish minute film can have more daily screenings than a 2 hour film. The pressure is generally to keep films shorter. This is probably where you get your sense of why a film should be only be a certain length.
But throughout film history many blockbusters have bucked this notion. Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Napoleon, Greed, Les Miserables, Children of Paradise, Fanny and Alexander, Berlin Alexanderplatz (14 hours!), Gandhi, etc.
And, once upon a time, the audience was routinely primed for such long films. The notion of a night at the cinema was the rule rather than the exception. Newsreels, cartoons, single reel featurettes and serials preceded the feature (which is why we still call them feature films) The “Double feature,” which has completely disappeared, other than in a few art houses, was a mainstay of movie going for decades. Your sense of what a movie’s length “should be” is based on the needs of distributors and multiplex owners and not on anything intrinsic about movies themselves.
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T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What’s the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
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