Chris Harlan
Forum Replies Created
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[Herb Sevush] “On a more serious note Eugene O’neil’s plays were often very long and Strange Interlude, which runs over 4 hours, is often staged with a dinner break or alternatively over two days.
“The Iceman Cometh is four plus hours. Brilliant play!
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[Herb Sevush] “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.”
Yeah, I watched the first three seasons of Breaking Bad this way.
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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. -
[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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[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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[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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[Steve Connor] “I saw this recently, it’s an astounding piece of work.
I hope the movie lives up to it!
S”
I just finished reading the book, which is astounding in its own right. It takes guts to try to turn that into a movie–with a running time of 3:45, no less! Even if it fails, it will be a spectacular fail. One worth seeing. The trailer DOES line up well with the book, so I have hope.
Good on the Tom Tyker and the Wachowskis for taking on something truly hard, but worth doing.
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[Paul Jay] “All your drives have e-sata. Get a lacie sata thunderbolt hub and you will have 2 drives running SATA speeds for fast editing.
“LOL. There are a LOT of earlier model G-RAIDS that are Firewire only. I don’t think they started adding eSATA until just a couple of years ago, around 2009 or 2010. I’ve got a half-dozen of those. I am using that LaCie TBolt hub, though. It works pretty well.
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[John Kaley] “For the youngsters. Witch logic:
“Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
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LOL!