the list of 9 for march 11, 2008:
THE NINE LONGEST MOVIES I'VE EVER SEEN
Recently I was having a chat with my composer Christopher Farrell about film length. He hadmentioned one filmmaker whose films tended to be a little long. I joked that my own films seem toturn out much shorter than I had intended (namely Claustrophobia). It got me thinking aboutthe longest movies I'd ever seen. Here they are, from "shortest" to most butt-numbing. I'm notincluding Gone With the Wind because I only saw it once, as a child, and I'm not sure if Iwatched the entire thing. (I am also not including Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom, part 1 orpart 2, even though I saw both 4-hour parts in the cinema, because like other famously long foreign filmssuch as Berlin Alexanderplatz, Das Boot and Fanny and Alexander, The Kingdomwas made as a TV series in Trier's native country, and not as a theatrical feature. So it doesn'tcount.)

  1. TITANIC, 194 minutes. It still amazes me that thisincredibly long and frankly awful film is the all-time box office champion.

  2. SCHINDLER'S LIST, 195 minutes. You'd think James Cameronwould have wanted his 1997 boat movie to top Steven Spielberg's 1993 Holocaust epic by a minute.But maybe the King of the World decided not to outdo the earlier, better film's length.

  3. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING, 201minutes. I'm not even talking about Peter Jackson's extended "director's cut" of thisfilm. What made it into the theatres was actually two hundred and one minutes long. You sense atheme, here? Make a movie as long as it could possibly be, and you'll win the Best Picture Oscar.

  4. APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, 202 minutes. Francis Coppola's owndirector's cut of his cult Vietnam drama saw a brief release several years after the originalmovie came out. I believe I saw it, though the details are hazy. Did I catch it in cinemas or at afriend's house on DVD?

  5. THE SEVEN SAMURAI, 207 minutes. As with a lot of longmovies, Akira Kurosawa's samurai masterpiece has been shown throughout the years and across theworld in various lengths. But I saw this, the full, original version, a few years back. It's maybe the least boring of all the films on this list.

  6. EUREKA, 217 minutes. This obscure 2000 film from Japan (anation not unfamiliar with drawn-out dramas) is a contemporary fable about the random survivors ofa fatal bus hijacking. Not only over three and a half hours long but also filmed in black andwhite, Eureka is a challenge, but not without its rewards.

  7. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, 227 minutes. This was another one ofthose "re-released in its full glory after decades!" experiences, somewhere around 1990. I saw itand, even with the intermission, and watching it on the big screen in 65mm and everything, I foundit a bit dull. Sorry fans.

  8. HAMLET, 242 minutes. So Kenneth Branagh set out to make afilm adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet - unabridged (and also in 65mm, not thatBranagh made much use of this). The result is hardly a classic - Branagh's hammy Hamlet reallyblows a couple of scenes - but it's a decent enough introduction to the full play.

  9. 1900, 315 minutes. Bernardo Bertolucci's epic (what elsecan I call it?) about two friends/enemies in early 20th Century Italy has lots of shocking moments- including a shot featuring the erect penises of both Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu (atleast they were both still young and not fat) and a particularly disturbing scene of DonaldSutherland raping and murdering a little boy - but in the end there's no need for this dull,knee-jerkingly pro-Communist drama to have been over five hours long.

Copyright © Mark Tapio Kines 2011