Here are a couple more deemed slow, but they’re brilliant:
Barry Lyndon. It creeps along slowly but steadily and is gorgeous to look at throughout. The duel scene is glacial but is eerie Kubrick tension at its best.
Blood Simple. The Coen Brothers’ first movie. Quite slow, but I’m on the edge of my seat for most of the movie, especially at the end when the personal detective is trying to take out Frances McDormand.
Chinatown. It’s a little bit faster, but this movie has the most hypnotic pacing. It walks along unhurriedly and methodically through all the evidence that Jake is taking in, telling a story as it does, and it feels like a smooth ride in a 1948 convertible along Ventura Boulevard.
Agreed. Locke, if anything, is a very fast movie since lots of things are happening at once all the time.
Terrence Malick, however, does purposefully slow movies, the kind where the plot stops so the viewer can enjoy a beautiful image in quiet contemplation. Honestly, if anybody had described a movie like The New World, I would think they are talking about the most boring thing ever (What? Five minutes of Colin Farrell walking through a wheat field? Nooooo thankyou.) However, once you start the whole thing is quite mesmerizing.
There are always going to be exceptions. There are classic movies with a frantic pace and modern movies that drift along languidly. But overall, I think it’s true that modern movies have a faster overall pace.
I think it may be a change in filmmaking styles. Writers and directors used to emphasize their fast scenes by intentionally pacing other parts of the movie slowly. The idea was that the slow scenes would lull the audience and make the fast scenes seem faster. Nowadays writers and directors are more likely to use an overloading technique. The idea here is to have one fast scene after another with no breaks so they overwhelm the viewer’s perception. Both techniques can work; which works better depends on the skills of the filmmakers and the preferences of the audience.
David Frost’s The Straight Story - about a guy who drives a lawn tractor from Iowa to Minnesota. The whole theme of the movie is going slow and enjoying the journey.
Blade Runner IS slow. It was slow by the standards of 1982 and it’s slow by today’s standards. When it was released, its slowness was remarked upon, and sometimes criticized, by a lot of movie critics. It’s two hours long but has fewer plot developments than a typical feature length film, and relatively little dialogue.
Of course, it’s slow on purpose; it has a great many establishing shots and lingers on stuff a lot. The movie is meant to be reflective and pensive. The environment, and seeing it, it supposed to be a big part of it.
If that isn’t your particular bag, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.
*“Slow” *is one of those really misused terms when describing movies, IMO.
When I read a lot of comments, especially by those who haven’t seen many films made before the 90’s or this century, I’ll see many say the film was slow, perhaps stressing that they’re bored by the pacing. Want to know what I consider “Slow” (or boring) in films?
Michael Bay films
Transformers
TMNT films
any film that fills each scene with the same old explosions, crashes, chases, fights… etc. Yawn
Damn, I’ll take the cat and mouse chase at the end of Blade Runner or any on your edge scene from any Hitchcock film over yet another borefest like Independence Day
Slow, or boring isn’t because of lack of action or speed. Slow/boring is the same old thing shown over and over again.
Star Wars?
The French Connection? (perhaps the greatest chase scene of all time)
Jaws?
The Exorcist?
I would never call any of those 1970 films boring. Far from it.
Malick is a director who includes a lot of scenes in his film that at first glance may seem ponderous and slow, but you mentioned a great example with The New World.
All of those purposeful scenes, like the one you describe, does an AMAZING job of depicting what it may have felt like, walking through great pastures of land that may never been trodden before by any human. Every one of this scenes transports the viewer into a new world. IMO the BEST way to get that feeling across to the audience.
I agree, but if you read many reviews or comments by people who have watched very few or no films made before, 1990 or so, they DO equate slow with boring.
And come to think of it, what does slow mean if not boring?
