I’ll be brief: Perhaps the most culturally savvy sketch to appear on Saturday Night Live in ages aired recently, a comic music video in which Pete Davidson, Gunna, Simon Rex, and Chris Redd (if you don’t know who any of those performers are, it’s OK) rap about the virtues of entertainment products that clock in well under two hours.
“These days when I sit down to watch a movie,” Davidson begins the song, “I can find just about anything in the world. But night after night, there’s only one kind of movie I’m always looking for.” Here comes the chorus: “And that’s a short-ass movie, a really short movie.”
An hour and 40 minutes is OK, but an hour 20 is better. Whatever you do, Davidson warns, don’t click on Once Upon a Time in America, an endless film that would be too long at half its 229-minute runtime. (Director Sergio Leone always took an hour just to clear his throat.)
It’s a theme on which I have written before, and goodness knows I could have kept my argument shorter. I will do my best, here, to make my case in a sprint instead of a marathon. But I stand by my judgment that Michael Caine’s British take on a Charles Bronson-style revenge pic is just right at an hour 43.
How do you know what to avoid without searching for the runtime? If you’re looking for a short-ass movie, anything with an overture is right out. Orchestral preliminaries are there to tell you that you are about to see something significant, something important, something way too long. An overture tells the audience that time is of such little concern to the picture’s director that he or she is happy to make them sit through incidental music where there is no incident.
And then there are the pictures that indulge, not only in overtures, but in intermissions and exit music as well. Lawrence of Arabia is one such. So, too, Doctor Zhivago. So, too, Ryan’s Daughter. David Lean has some ‘splainin’ to do.
At least Lean’s epics are epic. By all means, stay away from flimsy films that strive for importance by adding on the symphonic bric-a-brac. The worst offender, off the top of my head, is Grand Prix, a 1966 race car movie with James Garner. That’s right, director John Frankenheimer (even his name is too long) thought a race car movie with James Garner needed the gravitas an overture brings.
There is one significant misstep in the SNL crowd’s recommendation for brevity: They tout the 1977 avant-garde flick Eraserhead. Sure, it’s only one hour and 29 minutes. But that just goes to show how excruciatingly long an hour and a half can be.
In response to the SNL spoof, Netflix added a basket of “short-ass movies” to its service. Among the selections is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, admirably short even if the ending is abrupt.
The desire for short films isn’t to be dismissed as mere impatience or lack of attention span. It is a statement in opposition against the ponderous and the pompous. For example, the latest film in the Batman franchise comes in for much-deserved abuse. The director of that recent three-hour film seemed to mistake glowering stares for Shakespearean soliloquies. The longer the stare, director Matt Reeves would have us believe, the more powerful the emotion. Alas, after drinking an oversized movie-theater soda, it’s just so much bladder-straining staring.
There is, I should point out, a short-ass Batman movie for those (and I include myself) tired of the Dark Knight’s endless existential crisis. Three cheers for that epic of kitsch, the 1966 Batman movie in which the caped crusader is played by Adam West and the Riddler by Frank Gorshin, as it was meant to be.
And holy no-filler or byproducts, Batman, there’s no overture. Good thinking, Robin!
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
