So I'm trying to go tonight, though I haven't mentioned it to my wife yet. But the options available, the ones I most need to watch to stay current on the film conversation, aren't very enticing, especially for a 9 o'clock viewing.
It's not their content, though I have to admit that the latest James Bond is feeling more like a duty than a pleasure to me right now. It's their length.
I've chosen Eternals for the artwork of this post as it perfectly exemplifies the phenomenon I'm talking about today (and goes well with my title for the post), though it's not a serious candidate for tonight's viewing, since I know it's coming to Disney+ before Christmas, and can pick it off then.
I'm a bit Marveled out at the moment, but the really onerous thing about Eternals is its length: 157 minutes. If Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, my first return to the cinema, wore me out with 25 minutes' less girth, just imagine what the poorly reviewed Eternals will do to me with an extra half-hour of run time tacked on.
Two other must-haves are better options, given that if I don't get them in the theater I may not get them at all before my deadline for closing off my 2021 list: the aforementioned No Time to Die, and Ridley Scott's latest, starring Adam Driver and Matt Damon, The Last Duel. (Side note: Isn't every duel somebody's "last duel"?)
When would those movies movies get me back out of my seat again, you ask?
No Time to Die: 163 minutes later.
The Last Duel: 153 minutes later.
Oy.
James Bond will probably win out, if only for reasons of practicality. I have a website to think about, and my ReelGood readers -- diminished in number though they may be -- will probably be most interested in a Bond review. It's something we have to do if we are going to be a "website of record" (kind of like The New York Times is a "paper of record"). Besides, the clicks help in whatever nebulous goal I'm trying to achieve.
But damn, that's the longest of the three movies I've mentioned so far, just 17 minutes shy of three hours. I can't even imagine what sort of artificial stimulants I might need to keep me awake for the whole movie, especially since I already know how early I've gotten up this morning (7:30, which is actually late for me), not to mention how poorly I've been napping in the afternoons.
The other options aren't significantly better. Jane Campion's first proper feature since 2009, The Power of the Dog, is a good contender, and has a regional interest to our audience as the director hails from New Zealand. That film's 126 minutes are downright modest compared to the others, but the film still keeps you in your seat for more than two hours. I've already decided to wait until video for a second Adam Driver movie in theaters, Annette, but that one is 139 minutes as well.
In fact, I can't find a single movie playing right now that meets either a reviewing need or a year-end list need that is under two hours.
Does it get any better from here? Not really. Dune, which releases December 2nd, and West Side Story are both 156 minutes. Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley is 139 minutes. Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, clocks in at a typically Andersonian 133 minutes. Even Ghostbusters: Afterlife is over two hours at 125 minutes. And though Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections don't have listed running times yet, 140 minutes would figure to be on the modest side for those two.
The only "big movie" still coming out this year that is reasonable in length is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which has already opened in the U.S. but opens here in a few weeks. Somehow they brought this one in at only 97 minutes. Hallelujah. Too bad I didn't like the first one and may give this one a miss, to use the Australian phrasing.
Just so you aren't confused by why I'm writing this post today, this does not qualify as some sort of shocking revelation. I know movies are long these days. Studios once told directors to cut 20 minutes from a movie because they were worried that audiences would be scared off by the length. Now, following the "more is more" logic used by Netflix on their TV series (for example), studios are happy with that 20 minutes and might even prefer an additional 20 if you've got 'em lying around.
It's just that it feels like all the movies are long. There's no way to find something shorter unless you are going for a genre that has traditionally run shorter, such as comedy or horror, but even those movies run longer than they once did.
The consequence of this is that I have watched a bunch of movies lately where I needed to re-read the plot synopsis afterward to be sure I didn't miss anything. The last movie I saw in the theater, The Many Saints of Newark, was right on two hours exactly, but I started it at 9:15 after a long day, and that meant there were moments I missed as I nodded off. Given that it tackles more than a dozen characters and is trying to scratch an itch that has been building up in fans since The Sopranos ended in 2007, that's probably one that could reasonably have been even longer.
It's continued this weekend even with home viewings. The past two evenings I struggled through viewings of Titane (108 minutes) and Red Notice (117 minutes). Neither of those movies is too long in and of themselves, but life's cumulative exhaustion has left me less equipped to tackle them. And the longer movies I've watched have contributed to that. Even the ones I haven't watched yet are contributing to it in advance out of sheer anticipation.
Solutions? Stop watching movies I guess?
I just have to plow through. But complaining about it here helps, I guess.
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