CB goes to the movie theater all the time, but I’ve probably only seen two or three films in an actual movie theater in the past three years. I mostly just wait to rent films on Vudu or wait until something comes out on another streamer. That has affected how I perceive films today as well – it’s so nice to be able to pause something to get a snack or use the bathroom, and being able to engineer my own “intermissions” helps me get through some long-ass movies. I will do the same with Killers of the Flower Moon, a three-and-a-half-hour movie, in theaters now. I’m waiting for it to come onto AppleTV+ because my ass is not going to sit in a movie theater for that length of time. Well, writer/director Alexander Payne has spoken up about how filmmakers need better editors or something, because the movies have gotten way too long.

Alexander Payne agrees: Some movies today are simply “too damn long.” The Sideways director was speaking at the Middleburg Film Festival on Saturday to promote his new film, The Holdovers, when he criticized overly long runtimes.

“You want your movie to be as short as possible,” Payne said, according to IndieWire. “There are too many damn long movies these days.”

Payne added that a movie can successfully pull off a long runtime: But “if your movie is three and a half hours, at least let it be the shortest possible version of a three-and-a-half-hour movie. Like The Godfather Part II [and] Seven Samurai are super tight, three-and-a-half-hour movies and they go by like that. So there’s no ipso facto judgment about length.”

Payne didn’t cite any particular offender, but his comments came on the opening weekend of Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour drama Killers of the Flower Moon. While the film has received considerable acclaim from critics, the top complaint about the movie — particularly among its audience reviews — is that the film drags on far too long and could have benefited from a much tighter edit.

Added Payne: “Film is a constant search for economy. You want the screenplay as short as possible. You want the acting as brisk as possible, given whatever the basic rhythm of that film is. And then in the editing you want it to be as short as it can possibly be, but no shorter.”

At the same time, the director admitted that when looking back at his own films, he also sees ways they could have also been shorter (with one exception: his 1999 high school political satire Election).

[From THR]

I’m trying to think of the last long-ass movie I watched where I thought they used every minute wisely. Probably Tar (2 hours 38 minutes) and Dune (2 hours 35 minutes). I would like to make special mention of Pedro Almodovar’s Pain & Glory, which came in under two hours but it felt a lot longer because of the strength of the story. Anyway, I agree that modern filmmakers need a tighter edit almost all of the time and that across the board, these long runtimes are stupid and excessive. Something has to give – if you want people to come back to movie theaters, don’t make them sit through three-hour slogs when you could have told the same story efficiently in 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.