[QUOTE=Maastricht]
That was the one I was going to mention. I couldn’t stand the movie, but many people think it’s a masterpiece.
I’ll quote one of the rave-reviews, that I found very well written:
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I absolutely love The New World while being the first to acknowledge that most people would hate it. And watching it at home would be deadly (I can only speculate; I’ve only seen it in the theaters, where it truly is magnficent).
[QUOTE=Tapioca Dextrin]
That must have been some marathon!
My vote would be Solaris. Nearly three hours long and nothing happens. But it happens beautifully.
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This is what I came in to mention. Lifetime topten movie, but very very slow. All of Tarkovsky’s movies. All masterpieces, but you have to give yourself over to his sense of time to get the most out of them.
[QUOTE=Sitnam]
Ebert said **City of God ** was one of the best movies he’s ever seen so I had to rent it. It was long, but WELL worth sitting through.
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It is a long movie (and apparently one of the few on which I agree with Ebert) but I’d hardly call it boring. Although it has a few long scenes, the film is typified by quick cuts and chronological or scene jumps that require the viewer to be alert, and pretty constant level of action and violence. It certainly isn’t any slower than Goodfellas, which I think is a pretty quick-moving film.
Although it’s not that long, the Russian film The Return is slow, and builds up to a completely unexpected climax. Raging Bull, The Passenger, and Five Easy Pieces are all pretty slow-moving, and Chinatown, Once Upon A Time In The West, and Seconds all have their share of slow moments.
[QUOTE=msmith537]
I didn’t expect a Jason Bourne movie. I just didn’t find it as compelling as I thought I would. It was supposed to be “The Godfather of spy movies” but ended up more like The Godfather III of spy movies.
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I think the problem with The Good Shepherd isn’t that it was a bad movie, exactly, but that it was a great miniseries cut to movie length. There was clearly a lot more story to be told, and so many of the individual elements were cut to the bare minimum in order to squeeze it into a cinematic running length. It would have been vastly better as a 6-10 hour series as with A Perfect Spy or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. As it was, it lept from scene to scene, and often jaunting through decades without time to reflect upon the undercurrent of mistrust and deception. Many of the interesting subplots–like the CIA’s cautious involvement with the Mafia, or the infiltration and vying for position in post-war Germany–were way too brief, and the handling of Valentin was clumsy and unclear. It had the potential to be a great story at series length, but was just to vast for a film.
Stranger
This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’d recommend What Time Is It There?, by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. It is a sloooooow movie, but beautifully made.
IIRC, the entire movie is shot with stationary cameras, and there wasn’t a shot in it shorter than three or four minutes. I may not be 100% correct on that; there may be some shorter shots, but the majority of the film is shot like a series of five-minute plays, with characters walking into the picture, talking slowly to themselves, walking out again, continuing to talk offscreen, meandering back in, etc. There are lots of long, long pauses in the dialogue as well, and many–if not most–of the shots contain only one character.
Just rereading what I’ve written above, the movie sounds deadly dull, and at first I wanted to hurry it up, but after a while I sort of fell into the rhythm of it and got really interested. It was beautiful, one of those movies that leaves you (or left me, anyway) feeling like I’d had my sense of time stretched out. After I shut it off, it seemed like everything around me was moving intolerably fast and I wanted to turn it on again.
Again, not everyone will love this movie. Had I watched it on a different day, I might have hated it. But it really grabbed me.
[QUOTE=Tapioca Dextrin]
My vote would be Solaris. Nearly three hours long and nothing happens. But it happens beautifully.
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Is it anything like Stalker? Everyone seems to think that Tarkovsky is a genius for using long tracking shots, but I don’t see what the shots do to improve the movie. **Stalker **raises some interesting points about hope and religion, but I had to fight to stay awake through that one.
I liked The Deer Hunter, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Wages of Fear.
Stalker is the only movie I’ve ever walked out of. The second time was better, but not much.
[QUOTE=ArchiveGuy]
I absolutely love The New World while being the first to acknowledge that most people would hate it. And watching it at home would be deadly (I can only speculate; I’ve only seen it in the theaters, where it truly is magnficent).
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The Thin Red Line, by the same director, is exactly the same. Its a spectacular movie, but you you almost have to work to get into the movie.