Director John Waters is a dirty, dirty man, but he got it right when he said, No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes.
This is not advice that American comedies - or movies in general - follow. As anyone who promptly schedules a trip to the proctologist after an evening at the movies knows, movies are longer than ever these days. And though it could be said that it dulls the sting of an $8 movie ticket, sometimes it doesn't matter.
Take 2005's Wedding Crashers. I, like many others who contributed to its $209.2 million gross, was delighted to see an R-rated Animal House-esque flick that valued physical comedy and one-liners over raunchiness, but I have yet to meet someone who didn't think the last 30 of its 120 minutes, which meander into weepy romance, were anything less than torture.
It is a sin comedies and romantic comedies commit over and over: stacking the deck so the viewer knows exactly what will happen at the end, and still insisting on long, maudlin digressions often accompanied by Liz Phair's Why Can't I? Why can't editors and directors realize that sometimes less is more?
Because, according to box office receipts, we love long movies. Last year, the top 10 grossing films averaged 132 minutes, and the top 10 grossing movies yet this decade average 141 minutes. During the '90s, the 10 highest-grossing films were an average of 123 minutes, while in the 1980s, the movies that raked in the most averaged about 118 minutes.
There are factors that influenced this shift, like the fact that budgets are bigger and technology - like Chuck Norris - can do anything. But two hours is two hours, and longer does not always mean better. The most recent example of this is Ang Lee's critically acclaimed, 134-minute Brokeback Mountain
a good movie of a great short story that meanders too much until it loses steam before the film's emotional apex.
The idea of reining in run time, of course, is endlessly subjective. As much as I tapped my foot and checked my cell phone during obscenely overlong clunkers like Elizabethtown (123 mins) and Memoirs of a Geisha (145 mins), I wouldn't have wanted to see a moment cut from either King Kong (187 mins) or In Her Shoes (130 mins), both comparatively long for their respective genres.
Yes, shorter movies can often lack character development, but more often than not, they pack a more caustic punch (see the 96-minute-long A History of Violence for a perfect example), show a sharper focus or linger longer afterward.
It's story time, so pull up your carpet squares: In 1976, editor Ralph Rosenblum walked up to Woody Allen and told him that the three-hour rough cut of his movie, Anhedonia - a stream-of-consciousness narrative about murder, romance and a neurotic New Yorker - needed some massive cutting. Rosenblum really liked the scenes about the main character and his girlfriend, so why not chop the movie down to that? And that, kids, is how my favorite movie, Annie Hall was born.
Too bad more directors and editors haven't heard that one.
- Matt Burns is The Post's Campus Editor. Send him an e-mail at mb102503@ohiou.edu.
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Woody Allen and Diane Keaton star in the comedy Annie Hall. A three-hour rough cut of the classic was chopped down to 93 minutes before its release in 1977.
Lengthy films can lose audience attention
