Why is it that so many end-of-year US releases aimed at Oscar voters are so long, quite often pointlessly so? There seems to be only one reason - the history of the Academy Awards demonstrates that size does matter, that the electorate is swayed by a movie's length. Clocking in at 187 minutes, King Kong is the longest movie of the current season, and for all its many achievements, it could have lost 15 minutes or so in the central section.
Even Woody Allen has fallen in line - his new movie, Match Point, is, at 126 minutes, the longest in his prolific career. But it has to be said it never drags at any stage.
Steven Spielberg's Munich, which was rushed through post-production to qualify for Oscars, clocks in at 164 minutes. Among the many other year-end releases with a running time in excess of two hours are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (157 minutes), Memoirs of a Geisha (144), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (139), Walk the Line (136), The White Countess (135), Breakfast on Pluto (135), Brokeback Mountain (134), The Producers (134), Rent (128) and Syriana (126).
Meanwhile, as Terrence Malick's The New World opened on limited release in the US on Christmas Day with a running time of 149 minutes, Malick was still tweaking and trimming it, and a somewhat shorter version will be screened when the movie goes on wide US release in late January. It's not at all clear which version we will get when The New World opens here on January 27th.
