"Quickness" of Solace

[TedShatner10]

John_Picard wrote:

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106 minutes? ACK! IMHO, one of the reasons CR was so great is because the full story could be told properly. Short movies always leave out too many details, making it feel forced and rushed. I prefer a movie to have a minimal running time of 2 hours.

I dislike storylines getting butchered by unnecessary editing, but what is worse is a limited plot being overstreached to a 200 minutes or something silly like that. Casino Royale was not egregiously overlong, but it had weird pacing issues towards the end as soon as Bond gets 'rescued' by Mr. White. And 106 minutes is not much shorter than two hours (120 minutes) anyway.

[Timby]

John_Picard wrote:

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I prefer a movie to have a minimal running time of 2 hours.

This ... this, I do not understand. A movie should be the length needed to tell its story, no more and no less. A crime epic like HEAT needed all of its nearly three hours, but Ghostbusters was a taut 105 minutes, Casablanca is perfectly paced at 102 minutes, and WALL·E was, what, 90 minutes long?

My point is that there's no reason to have an artificial criterion for the length of a movie -- that's an idea as ridiculous as saying that a novel needs to be at least 350 pages long.

[TedShatner10]

^And Quantum of Solace is similar in length to Dr. No and Goldfinger.

[John Picard]

TedShatner10 wrote:

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I dislike storylines getting butchered by unnecessary editing, but what is worse is a limited plot being overstreached to a 200 minutes or something silly like that. Casino Royale was not egregiously overlong, but it had weird pacing issues towards the end as soon as Bond gets 'rescued' by Mr. White. And 106 minutes is not much shorter than two hours (120 minutes) anyway.

I agree that stretching a story is also bad, but to me, a short running time is akin to not getting my money's worth.

JKTim wrote:

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This ... this, I do not understand. A movie should be the length needed to tell its story, no more and no less. A crime epic like HEAT needed all of its nearly three hours, but Ghostbusters was a taut 105 minutes, Casablanca is perfectly paced at 102 minutes, and WALL·E was, what, 90 minutes long?

My point is that there's no reason to have an artificial criterion for the length of a movie -- that's an idea as ridiculous as saying that a novel needs to be at least 350 pages long.

The two movies people seem to gripe about the most regarding running time are Transformers and Casino Royale. To me, they both had excellent running times and told the full story. X-Men 3 and Spiderman 3 were both woefully inadequate in the story telling department and should have been longer.

[Timby]

John_Picard wrote:

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I agree that stretching a story is also bad, but to me, a short running time is akin to not getting my money's worth.

If a movie is short, but ridiculously entertaining (see my earlier example of WALL·E), have you not gotten your money's worth?

X-Men 3 and Spiderman 3 were both woefully inadequate in the story telling department and should have been longer.

The problems with those movies were not with their running times (at 139 minutes, Spider-Man 3 was longer than both of its predecessors) but rather with the quality of their scripts. To say that "longer movie = better movie" is an at-best spurious argument that has little to no foundation in logic -- see my earlier point about the length of books.

I mean, heck, Psycho is barely over an hour and a half long, and it's phenomenal. Same with Reservoir Dogs. There's no reason to say that in order to be good, a movie needs to have a length of X minutes. There's just as much room for The Godfather and Casino as there is for Cloverfield (84 minutes) and Good Night, and Good Luck (92 minutes).

[John Picard]

JKTim wrote:

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If a movie is short, but ridiculously entertaining (see my earlier example of WALL·E), have you not gotten your money's worth?

The problems with those movies were not with their running times (at 139 minutes, Spider-Man 3 was longer than both of its predecessors) but rather with the quality of their scripts. To say that "longer movie = better movie" is an at-best spurious argument that has little to no foundation in logic -- see my earlier point about the length of books.

I mean, heck, Psycho is barely over an hour and a half long, and it's phenomenal. Same with Reservoir Dogs. There's no reason to say that in order to be good, a movie needs to have a length of X minutes. There's just as much room for The Godfather and Casino as there is for Cloverfield (84 minutes) and Good Night, and Good Luck (92 minutes).

I guess you don't like long movies. Ghostbusters, which I just re-watched this past weekend, didn't really delve into the characters much. It was just a "fun" movie.

Then again, Raiders of the Lost Ark was 115 minutes, while Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was 122 minutes, yet with KotS, I felt like it was missing *something*.

[Timby]

John_Picard wrote:

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I guess you don't like long movies.

Yeah, you're right. I hate long movies.

Which is why I praised The Godfather, Casino and HEAT in this very thread.

[John Picard]

JKTim wrote:

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Yeah, you're right. I hate long movies.

Which is why I praised The Godfather, Casino and HEAT in this very thread.

Well, I've never watched those films, and with that in mind, why are you complaining about Casino Royale's long running time? Many, such as myself, thought the long running time was perfect, while others, like yourself, disagree. Such is the way of the world.

[Timby]

John_Picard wrote:

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Well, I've never watched those films, and with that in mind, why are you complaining about Casino Royale's long running time?

Where did I?

Oh, yeah. I didn't.

My entire point in this thread has been that long movies (like HEAT, nearly three hours long) can be just as good as shorter movies (like Reservoir Dogs), with the length of a movie being completely separate from the quality of the story. A movie being long or short has no bearing on whether or not it's actually good.

As an analogy, Of Mice and Men, at only a little over 100 pages, is just as spectacular a book as the several-hundred-page-long Moby Dick.

[Hermiod]

TedShatner10 wrote:

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Casino Royale was not egregiously overlong, but it had weird pacing issues towards the end as soon as Bond gets 'rescued' by Mr. White. And 106 minutes is not much shorter than two hours (120 minutes) anyway.

Exactly what I meant. The movie just stops. I thought it was finished until I looked at the remaining time display and realised how long was left.

[blablover5]

Hermiod wrote:

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Exactly what I meant. The movie just stops. I thought it was finished until I looked at the remaining time display and realised how long was left.

It's funny but I really like it up until they get to the casino then it just all grinds to a halt.

Using my special powers of iMovie I added the rifftrax track to it and had to burn it to two DVD's and I almost never watch the second half.

[TedShatner10]

^I'd say Casino Royale nearly went wrong between Mr. White shooting Bond's captives and the penny dropping for Bond about where Vesper's sentiments lay. But I liked the casino segment and Venice climax.

And Doctor Who's "Blink" had more to say than half the fiction out there in only 45 minutes, while the best 45 minute episode from either TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT also had more to say than than the collective 448 minutes of the TNG movies.

[CorporalClegg]

This actually concerns me a little. I've had this fear that, in order to avoid all of the typical "sequel" pitfalls, that this was just going to be like the "rest" of CR.

The short runtime might be more to that point.

[Starbreaker]

I don't think this is a bad thing. Casino Royale was just a tad bit too long.

[Hermiod]

bridezilla wrote:

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It's funny but I really like it up until they get to the casino then it just all grinds to a halt.

(Heh, nice change of username )

There's quite a few parts of the film that are just too long. The Casino, sure, the hospital where it just becomes a completely different movie and also the airport chase/action sequence.