Subject: RE: The (very) Long Red Line
From: Sean Draine (seandr@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Apr 03 2000 - 14:31:20 EDT
If anything, finance would dictate shorter films, which can
be screened more frequently, allowing the theater to pump
more ticket buyers in and out on a given day.
Of course, the increase in bandwidth is wasted if there's
little public interest in the film, so the bottom line is ultimately
a function of the film's appeal.
-----Original Message-----
From: Scottie Bowman [mailto:rbowman@indigo.ie]
Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2000 12:10 AM
To: Bananafish
Subject: The (very) Long Red Line
This question probably belongs more on a film list;
but we do, after all, have many members expert in
many non-literary fields.
I'm asking: Is there some economic reason for films
to be so long these days? I know there are certain
requirements if your film is going to cover its costs:
such as getting a certain minimum number of 17-23 male
bums on cinema seats on the first Saturdy night of
its release & so on. But is there some similar requirement
in regard to length?
I can understand Steve's response to The Thin Red Line.
But for me the film was far........far........far.......too.....long.
'In the midst of death we are in life' & the transcendence
of beauty & the general goshness of everything could have
been transmitted much more powerfully with a handful
of tight, selected images than with these endless pictures
of dappling water & waving palm fronds. Capturing the hill
seemed to be taking place in something even slower than real
time. Which conveys, no doubt, the tedium of war - but
dulls the perceptions of the audience. And is not, as veterans
have told me, how it actually feels.
Another film - mentioned in another post by Elizabeth -
Pulp Fiction seemed to me to be unending. I found myself
sitting with a painfully fixed grin nodding dutifully at
the allusions in much the same way as one smiles politely
at the fortieth joke being told you by your host when he
has taken his second drink too many. The violence was
hilarious in the first hour but arse-achingly boring by
the time we all finally reached the sixth.
To repeat myself - at even more tedious length - is there
some financial consideration behind the transformation
of The Movies into The Statics?
Scottie B.
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