Salt Lake Tribune - Movies: Time is relative, especially a movie's running time
Walking out of a Wednesday night preview screening of "Zodiac," I heard a group of teens summing up the movie: "That was sooooo boring!" The thing about "Zodiac," a compelling thriller about the real-life "Zodiac killer" who bedeviled the San Francisco Bay Area during the '70s, that will probably raise the most complaints isn't the movie's violence or profanity. It's the sheer length of the thing: 2 hours and 40 minutes.
But for that 160 minutes, you get a lot. Director David Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt pack in a lot of information about timelines, forensics and the other details of the case - and the movie features a strong ensemble of actors, led by Jake Gyllenhaal as a newspaper cartoonist who becomes obsessed with the case, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards as the SFPD detectives investigating the killer, and Robert Downey Jr. (in a performance that should be on somebody's short list for a supporting-actor Oscar) as the San Francisco Chronicle cop reporter who was driven to distraction by the unsolved case.
But for the squirming-in-your-seat crowd, it could have been worse: An early cut of the film ran 3 hours and 8 minutes.
Press this week. ''Nobody wants to wear out their welcome, but you want the audience to have a meaningful and varied experience.
" Movies that clock in at more than 2 hours, 20 minutes are rare in Hollywood, because anything longer means theaters get one fewer showing per day. Franchise films, like the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Harry Potter" movies, can get away with it because they will play on multiple screens at one theater. Studios will give some big-name directors, like Fincher or Robert De Niro (whose "The Good Shepherd" was 2 hours, 47 minutes), enough room to make the movie as long as their artistic vision or ego will let them.
The Oscars love long movies. "The Departed," this year's Best Picture winner, was 2 hours, 31 minutes - the longest of the five nominees. In the Oscars' 79-year history, 54 of the Best Picture winners were over two hours, and classics like "Ben-Hur," "Lawrence of Arabia," "The Godfather Part II" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" were each more than three hours.
(The longest Best Picture ever? "Gone With the Wind," at 3 hours, 42 minutes.) And if you don't go through studios, you can make a movie any length you want - but you have to persuade theaters to play the thing.
That's what David Lynch is doing with his latest, the surreal (even for him) Hollywood drama "Inland Empire," which opened this weekend at the Tower Theatre. All 2 hours and 52 minutes of it. I saw "Zodiac" and "Inland Empire," and I did not feel cheated of my valuable time.
I sat through "Wild Hogs," the alleged comedy about middle-aged pals playing "City Slickers" on a cross-country motorcycle trip, and thought to myself, "There's 96 minutes I'm never getting back." I've heard people say the same thing about "Reno 911! Miami," which was only 84 minutes.
I have a test to see how much I'm enjoying a movie, based on the first time I look at my watch. If it's after the one-hour mark, it's a good movie. If it's before the one-hour mark, the movie's not so good.
With "Zodiac," I was so engrossed by the case that I didn't look at my watch until about 70 minutes into the film. With "Wild Hogs," it was maybe 25 minutes - that's how dreadful and humorless the movie was. The second time I looked, I began to wonder if time had started moving backward.
There is no right length for a movie. The esteemed Roger Ebert summed it up best: "A good movie is never too long, and a bad movie is never short enough." And he said it in far fewer words than I just did.
* SEAN P. MEANS writes a daily blog, "The Movie Cricket," at blogs.sltrib.
com/movies. Send comments to Sean P. Means, movie critic, The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S.
400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.
Keywords: Salt Lake, Best Picture, Movie s, San Francisco, Lake Tribune, Wild Hogs, Time i, Inland Empire, Good Movie, That s
News RSS