Donald Clarkeon film
Woody Allen's great Annie Hall begins with angst- ridden Alvy Singer, using an ancient joke from the Catskills to illustrate his pathologically melancholic attitude to life. The anecdote focuses on two elderly Jewish ladies, neither of whom is enjoying her stay at the New York resort. "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible," one says. "Yeah, I know," her friend replies. "And such small portions."
The sequence came to mind when scrutinising the running time of three features released last week. Straightheads, Reno 911!: Miami and The Breed - a grisly list of titles, you'll agree - each clocked in at under 90 minutes. Indeed, Straightheads, a well-made though totally nonsensical revenge drama, managed to confine itself to a breathless 80 minutes. Best not bother with that large bucket of popcorn, my friend.
Surely some unwritten contract between audience and film-maker is being breached here. For the last 50 years or so, we have come to expect feature films to be at least an hour and a half long. There are, it is true, some exceptions. Animated pictures, and family films in general, regularly potter to a halt long before the 90-minute marker appears over the horizon. But mainstream features are required to last at least as long as a football match. Don't ask why.
It's the law. We have a constitutional right to demand that barely endurable cinematic effluent comes in containers of a certain size.
The technical definitions are, to be fair, somewhat more forgiving. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Institute both declare that to be regarded as a feature, a picture must be in excess of just 40 minutes. More realistically, the Screen Actors Guild defines the lower limit as 80 minutes. But consider this: Marty (1955), the shortest film to win a best picture Oscar, clocked in at just one minute over the football-match requirement.
One result of the unspoken rule has been the unhappy phenomenon of the compromised project that, with dubious precision, clocks in at exactly 90 minutes. Films rarely get to be that length by accident. If you see this worrying digit above a review in The Ticket you can, thus, be fairly sure that the producers, concerned about inflicting too much torture on their customers, have shovelled away sizable amounts of putrescent matter to leave a heap of garbage just big enough to be still saleable.
Factory Girl, that recent horrible Edie Sedgwick biopic, lasted 90 minutes. So did Little Man, I Want Candy and the remake of Fun with Dick and Jane. Need I say more?
With this in mind, we should, perhaps, welcome this apparent decision by producers to break the football-match rule. At a time when so many flatulent, empty stinkers feel able to drag on for two and a half hours, a return to the concision that characterised the great B movies must be a cause for celebration.
Remember The Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest? Really terrible . . . And such large portions.
