Something most unusual happened in Dublin this weekend - six movies opened and each of them has a running time of under two hours. Not only that, but three of them come in at under 90 minutes. This is remarkable at a time when more and more movies are running well in excess of two hours, with a few even tipping the three-hour mark. Size matters, according to the Godzilla publicity slogan - which backfired on that movie. But does it, or are many of today's over-extended movies alienating audiences? Less is more, the maxim goes, but more and more film-makers don't seem to be heeding this advice anymore. This is the time of year when our cinemas are still awash with all those high-minded productions aimed at the Oscars electorate, and directors seem to be more convinced than ever that the longer their movie the more likely it is to impress the Academy voters.
The truth is that they are often right. Most of the movies which collected the coveted best picture Oscar during the 1990s were exceedingly generous in terms of all the footage they offered the viewer. There was a whole 142 minutes of the execrable Forrest Gump, 162 leisurely minutes of The English Patient and a full three hours worth of both Braveheart and Dances With Wolves.
The even more generous Steven Spielberg spread Schindler's List over three hours and 15 minutes and finally won an Oscar for direction, and James Cameron allowed Titanic to sail on for exactly as long, becoming the self-proclaimed King of the World and achieving the biggest box-office success in cinema history. Cinema owners are more wary. At the recent ShoWest conference held in Las Vegas for international exhibitors, the National Association of Theatre Owners made two pleas to the Hollywood studios - for far more family fare and for films to last no longer than 100 minutes.
The exhibitors clearly have unhappy memories of the abject failure which met some extremely expensive recent movies, such as the Brad Pitt vehicle, Meet Joe Black, and the Kevin Costner picture The Postman, each of which clocked in at three insomnia-curing hours and flopped on release. Or the yawn-inducing Oprah Winfrey movie, Beloved, which ran for two hours and 51 minutes and also tanked at the box-office. Not to mention the recent Robin Williams movie, Bicentennial Man, which for no imaginable reason, was allowed to run on and on and on for a mind-numbing two hours and 13 minutes.
"Exhibitors love to hear a film is around the 90-minute mark, because they can get more shows in every day," says Paddy Kelly, Irish manager for United International Pictures, which distributed the 187-minute prison drama, The Green Mile, the longest of the new movies released here so far this year. "With limited shows you're not going to get your full potential at the box-office. But then, look at Titanic and Schindler's List. They became blockbusters, and we took in £1 million with The Green Mile in its first three weeks on release in Ireland, which is great for a picture of that length."
Joking about the tendency towards lengthy movies, screenwriter Larry Gelbart recently commented, "I haven't seen The Green Mile yet, so don't give away the middle."
That movie's respectful, essentially old-fashioned approach to narrative over such an extended duration may have deterred some viewers, but it unfolds at such a perfectly measured pace and with such impeccable craftsmanship that I was drawn to it all the way on seeing the film at the early hour of 9.45 one morning in February.
Opening here on May 19th and running one minute longer than The Green Mile, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia is an enthralling picture which follows the interlinked destinies of disparate characters over one eventful day and night in Los Angeles. Despite excellent reviews, a couple of Oscar nominations and a cast that includes Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore, the movie has taken a relatively disappointing $22 million at the US box-office - less than a fifth of what The Green Mile has earned there.
Robert Friedman of New Line Cinema, which financed Magnolia and released it in the US, says, "The problem for us, quite simply, was not only having a three-hour film, but also having a film that's not easily defined in a single line. The challenge was to get people in to see the movie."
Paul Thomas Anderson, the film's young director, comments: "Making a movie of this length does set you up for criticism. It's slightly arrogant and a little bold to require three hours of someone's life to tell a story. It means you really have to deliver. Like, if I hear a movie I'm going to see is three hours, I get a little uneasy." However, whereas I, for one, found both The Green Mile and Magnolia compelling from start to finish, a number of movies in the new middle ground - around the two-and-a-half-hour mark - struck me as padded and over-extended to the point that the entire film was undermined.
Michael Mann's The Insider runs for two hours and 38 minutes, and the problem is with the last 38 minutes, when the attention shifts from the moral focus of the film, the tobacco industry whistleblower played by Russell Crowe, to the altogether less interesting machinations going on at the current affairs division of CBS Television. Similarly, any number of scenes involving those poorly delineated, goody-goody Canadian supporters of Rubin Carter could have been pared off The Hurricane, a movie which sprawled along for an unwieldy two hours and 25 minutes.
I am grateful to Oliver Stone for sparing European audiences 12 minutes of American football footage in Any Given Sunday, which was shorn to a mere two hours and 30 minutes for release on this side of the Atlantic. There was the seed of an interesting movie in Kevin Smith's Dogma, but repeating its core ideas over and over for two hours and 10 minutes did the movie no favours. Even The Talented Mr Ripley, one of the most satisfying films I've seen this year, could have benefited from losing its last few scenes given that all the points made in those scenes already had been made so effectively.
If a movie is a real stinker, cutting it will do nothing for it apart from sparing the audience some agony. Take Nikita Mikhalkov's dire The Barber of Siberia, which somehow was chosen to open last year's Cannes Film Festival. It employs a laboriously contrived flashback device to tell the story of a young American woman (played by an infuriating Julia Ormond), who, in 1885, travels from Chicago to Moscow and poses as the daughter of an eccentric inventor (Richard Harris) to seduce a Russian general into funding the inventor's elaborate new-fangled machine for cutting down forests.
Made on a budget of $45 million, The Barber of Siberia is the most expensive Russian film ever made and it was a hit in Russia where it ran for a mind-boggling six hours. Mercifully, the movie was shorn in half - to a still tortuous three hours - for its premiere in Cannes, where it was reviled so much that it's unlikely to be widely released anywhere in the world outside Russia.
Many of the excesses of overly long movies may be attributed directly to the vanity and self-indulgent of directors and actors. However, David Thomson, the esteemed author of A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, has another theory. "At the other end of the production process, editing has given up the handling of film and the direct application of scissors or sharp blades for what I'd call Avid-gazing," Thomson wrote recently in The New York Times. "The Avid is the standard system for computer editing, and it is a way of working - some heretics allege - that encourages moodiness, brooding, felt passages, grace interviews, small talk, luxuriant fades and dissolves.
"You may not notice the fattening, day by day, but before you know it your film is 25 minutes longer than you thought it was going to be. There's a sort of stagnant, perfumed loveliness just hanging about in your movie. The story takes longer, and as every old-time Hollywood expert knew, with the kind of stories they were telling, you needed to hurry so no one in the audience had time to wonder about the holes and implausibilities."
Jack Foley, the distribution chief at USA Films which released Mike Leigh's 161-minute Gilbert & Sullivan movie Topsy-Turvy in the US, says, "You can't tell a film-maker not to make a three-hour movie". With more and more film-makers demanding and getting final cut, whereby they have the last word on what constitutes the finished film, directors will be less and less willing to listen to pleas for shorter pictures. Last year in the US, 20 movies were released with running times in excess of two hours and 15 minutes, most of them at the end of the year in time for Oscars qualification. In 1989 there were only four releases of that length, and in 1979 there were eight.
It might be expected that some of the longer recent releases would be more popular on video than as cinema releases, given that audiences view videos in unconfined circumstances where they have the option of stopping at will for a self-imposed intermission. However, it generally has been the case that the longer movies which failed in cinemas fared no better in video rentals.
Meanwhile, avid soap fans happily watch four episodes of Coronation Street every week, which adds up to over 100 hours a year. And I am one of those viewers who prefers to tape series which have finite runs - addictive dramas such as Our Friends in the North and This Life - and watch them in back-to-back episodes over an occasional marathon weekend session.
Which is why, while you may be heading off to see The Green Mile or The Hurricane or Any Given Sunday over this long holiday weekend, I will be immersed in The Sopranos, all 13 episodes of the first series.