An obvious choice...Star Trek The Motion Picture. Let's just have the actors stare at the special effects. Let's have long stares at the special effects. Kirk watches (masturbates) to the Enterprise.
Films that would've been better had they been shorter
- Thread starter Rii
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IIRC, the reason why it took so long for Gangs of New York to come out was because Scorsese was caught in a bloody battle with the studio over the final edit.
I kinda liked some of that stuff. However, the movie did need some drastic trimming. It overdid the angst and had too many artsy shots of moss on rocks. All this movie needed to be great was some heavy-handed studio interference to cut down its length (and a different actor in the lead).
I loved that opening parkour chase. It was long but it was interesting and demonstrates how to make an exciting action scene where you can still tell what's going on, without a lot of shaky cam & indecipherable edits. (I'm looking at you, Paul Greengrass!
)IMO, Casino Royale was at its best when it was doing it's own thing, not trying to faithfully adapt the original novel. The new chase scenes were fantastic. But every time they go back to the poker table, the movie grinds to a halt.
Agreed about 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's the world's greatest 45 minute short film wrapped in an hour's worth of stoner effects.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture could have used even more trimming than what The Director's Edition tried to do. Anyway you slice it, it's still going to be the slowest, most thoughtful of the Star Trek movies. But still, it could be a much tighter movie without all the FX-porn.
Peter Jackson's King Kong takes 3 hours to tell a story that one of the Simpsons Halloween specials was able to tell in 10 minutes, and in a much more entertaining way.
("I hear we're going to Ape Island to capture a giant ape."
"I wish we were going to Candy Apple Island."
"Candy Apple Island? What do they got there?"
"Apes, but they're not as big.")
They need to get to Skull Island faster and have far less dinosaurs & giant bugs when they get there. All of the other monsters tend to diminish King Kong's significance anyway. Why are they so fixated on this one giant ape when there are frikken' dinosaurs all over the place!?!?!! My inner 12-year-old can tell you with great authority that dinosaurs are cooler than apes, no matter how big the apes are.
While I think The Lord of the Rings generally makes very good use of its long running time, I think each of the movies could have used some trims.
The Fellowship of the Ring does really well for the 1st 2 hours. But after Gandalf dies fighting the Balrog, the movie just can't come up with anything to top that, and the last hour meanders a lot up until Boromir dies. (If they weren't so beholden to the books, I would have suggested a lot of structure changes in pre-production, merging a bunch of the Lothlorien scenes into the Rivendell sequence and perhaps re-staging a bunch of the stuff at the end with Boromir's death, Merry & Pippin getting captured, and Frodo's departure into the Moria sequence. Combine those with Gandalf's death and you have an even more severe "Oh shit" cliffhanger ending.)
The Two Towers is structured a lot better. But still, my friends & I would often refer to Aragorn's flashback dreams of Arwen as the movie's "bathroom break." Those scenes serve no purpose except to shoehorn Arwen into a movie that she doesn't need to be in.
In some ways, The Return of the King has to be as long as it is simply because the 2 previous movies have set up such epic expectations. Still, the endings drag on more than they should and include too many deceptive wide-shots & fades-to-black that make you think the movie is ending before it actually does.
The Transformers movies are all way too stupid to be 2 1/2 hours long. They need to be slimmed down to 90-100 minutes each. They still wouldn't be great movies but at least they'd be tolerable and perhaps a lot of fun.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is a perfect example of how to give an action movie a brisk, bouncy pace. Unfortunately, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life didn't seem to understand that.
Part of me wishes that Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith ended with the shot of Darth Vader & Emperor Palpatine overseeing the construction of the Death Star, rather than dragging us through the motions of the obvious fates of baby Leia & Luke.
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones made some smart cuts when they had to cut it down for the Imax version. In particular, they cut some of the worst Anakin/Padme "romantic" "dialogue."
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace has a lot of padding, particularly the pod race. What's worse, the DVD actually extends the pod race scene.
I like the poker scenes well enough but having read the original book, I can definitely say the movie was better. If they had adapted that movie straight, you would have had a boring ass film. Bond does virtually nothing in the book but play poker.
I probably would have knocked off fifteen or so minutes on "Funny People." That's one that immediately springs to mind.
I would cut a huge chunk out of the middle of "Wall-E". I love the bookending sequences on earth, but most of the stuff in space (aside from Wall-E and Eve's lovely 'dance') was awful. I hated the human characters and all the wacky robots chasing Wall-E. They ruined what might have been a perfect movie without them.
"Death Proof" was way too long. The only way I could watch the first half was by surfing the net and looking away during the many, many boring parts. It would have been terrific as a 30 minute short film. The last thirty minutes or so had some fun conversations and probably the most entertaining car chase I've ever seen in any movie.
The characters, events, and conversations in the first half of the movie didn't do much for me, though. There were a few brief moments of enjoyable dialog, thrilling automotive mayhem, and a delightful striptease, but the movie would probably have been better off without all the dull conversations between them.
I also agree "Funny People" was way too long. People say "The 40-Year-Old-Virgin" and "Knocked Up" were too long, but not for me. I thought Apatow paced those movies just right, but he went too far on the follow-up. I don't care how 'deep' the movie is supposed to be, no movie that is first and foremost a comedy should be 'epic' length (maybe "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", but even that is pushing it).
"The Seven Samurai" is agonizingly long. I don't mind when a movie is epic length if the story justifies it ( i.e. "Gone with the Wind", "Lawrence of Arabia"), but this movie didn't need to be that stretched out. I didn't see much more to it besides scenes of people crying and whining and the occasional battle scene. Blasted waste of time.
Same goes for "Apocalypse Now". Most of the movie is just a guy on a boat making a journey that drags on and on, trying to find someone who ends up being a huge disappointment given how long we're made to wait for him to show up. "Heart of Darkness" was a much more engaging book.
The fact that the premise is a man travelling my boat doesn't automatically make it bad. "The African Queen" was basically just two people on a boat, but it was ten times more enthralling because the two characters were so endearing and had great dialog. The guy in "Apocalypse Now" occasionally encountered some interesting characters, but most of the time his trip was a huge bore.
The first "Lord of the Rings" movie was so unbearably long and boring to me, I couldn't bring myself to watch the next two, even after all the critical acclaim and I still can't. I don't think any other movie has made me check my watch over and over again, just praying it would be over soon. Watching that movie in a theatre was torturous. That scene where Orlando Bloom busts out his bow and arrow and messes some suckas up was all right. The rest, blech!
"Death Proof" was way too long. The only way I could watch the first half was by surfing the net and looking away during the many, many boring parts. It would have been terrific as a 30 minute short film. The last thirty minutes or so had some fun conversations and probably the most entertaining car chase I've ever seen in any movie.
The characters, events, and conversations in the first half of the movie didn't do much for me, though. There were a few brief moments of enjoyable dialog, thrilling automotive mayhem, and a delightful striptease, but the movie would probably have been better off without all the dull conversations between them.
I also agree "Funny People" was way too long. People say "The 40-Year-Old-Virgin" and "Knocked Up" were too long, but not for me. I thought Apatow paced those movies just right, but he went too far on the follow-up. I don't care how 'deep' the movie is supposed to be, no movie that is first and foremost a comedy should be 'epic' length (maybe "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", but even that is pushing it).
"The Seven Samurai" is agonizingly long. I don't mind when a movie is epic length if the story justifies it ( i.e. "Gone with the Wind", "Lawrence of Arabia"), but this movie didn't need to be that stretched out. I didn't see much more to it besides scenes of people crying and whining and the occasional battle scene. Blasted waste of time.
Same goes for "Apocalypse Now". Most of the movie is just a guy on a boat making a journey that drags on and on, trying to find someone who ends up being a huge disappointment given how long we're made to wait for him to show up. "Heart of Darkness" was a much more engaging book.
The fact that the premise is a man travelling my boat doesn't automatically make it bad. "The African Queen" was basically just two people on a boat, but it was ten times more enthralling because the two characters were so endearing and had great dialog. The guy in "Apocalypse Now" occasionally encountered some interesting characters, but most of the time his trip was a huge bore.
The first "Lord of the Rings" movie was so unbearably long and boring to me, I couldn't bring myself to watch the next two, even after all the critical acclaim and I still can't. I don't think any other movie has made me check my watch over and over again, just praying it would be over soon. Watching that movie in a theatre was torturous. That scene where Orlando Bloom busts out his bow and arrow and messes some suckas up was all right. The rest, blech!
Judd Apatow. He refuses to edit his movies. It's really to the detriment of his films.
Agreed.
And I love every single damn frame of "Seven Samurai." I wouldn't change a single thing, but that's just me.
And I love every single damn frame of "Seven Samurai." I wouldn't change a single thing, but that's just me.
Totally agree. Numb-bum, time-checking, get onwithitforpity'ssake.
I probably only would have trimmed the last movie, personally.
I fall in between these two stools. I thought the first two movies were fine, but my butt was definitely getting numb by the end of the third.
A lot of people seem to think that Jackson's King Kong was also too long, but I re-watched it recently, and liked it fine.
Mind you--I haven't seen the extended Director's Cut. That might test even my patience.
It would be much better if they cut some time from the trip through V'Ger and Spokes EVA activity for one. I know they wanted to show the physical size of V'Ger and have Spock meld with it so we could learn a bit of its history, but it seems more like a SFX budget gone mad. When I watch it, I skip everything from Spock leaving the Enterprise to the Enterprise arriving at the center of V'Ger.
Very good points and I couldn't agree more.
Wyatt Earp, I really enjoy this movie but it does tend to drag in parts. The whole part about his wife is drawn out, as well as his one way road to destruction. That whole sequence could have been fine tuned and still been good; also cutting a good half an hour out of the film.
Once Upon a Time in the West needed to have some of the tedious closeups of the characters' faces trimmed and should've ended when the camera panned from Harmonica with Cheyenne's body to the sky, instead of having the viewer endure a tedious look at the railroad station under construction at the end.
MeanJoePhaser
Admiral
The GRINDHOUSE theatrical version didn't even have the striptease. MISSING REEL.
So think how much more boring the first part was without it.
Not related to length, but I wondered why the 3 women left the actress alone with the somewhat creepy redneck car owner, too.
Didn't they say the only way he'd let them take the car was if they left her with him, letting him think he was going to get some action with her? It was immoral, obviously, but there was a logic to it, and I thought it was funny, because her actually saying, "gulp" was one of my favourite funny lines of the movie.
I saw "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof" individually on DVD at two separate occasions. When they did the missing reel thing during the sex scene in "Planet Terror", I thought it was pretty funny to insert it at that moment, but it might have annoyed me in "Death Proof" as the scenes preceding it were so dull. Again, it probably would have been a little funny how they of course cut out a part that much of the audience would most want to see, but a little more frustrating too. That striptease kinda saved the first act to me.
