The Black Dahlia. I kept waiting for it to become engaging and meaningful, and for there to be some sort of payoff. Never happened. Should have walked out of the theater when I was first struck by the idea.
I’ll third Solaris on the positive side, though.
My reaction was the opposite. Loved the first 2/3 or so, then I thought it flew off the rails. At least initially. Driving home it dawned on me why it “flew off the rails”. Love that movie.
Ten minutes into Napoleon Dynamite, I thought to myself, What the fuck kinda movie did I let these idiots drag me to? About ten minutes after that, I started to love it.
I’d like to suggest Babette’s Feast. I saw it long ago. It’s one of those movies that’s starts a little slow, but builds up to one of the most delightful and charming movies I have ever seen.
J.
Contact (with Jodie Foster). I really wanted to like it but it was just too slow of a build up and too little payoff. I read the Carl Sagan book, thinking it would be better than the movie, but other than some very minor details it was the same. It’s like Sagan got as far as “we’re definitely going to come into some type of contact with other beings” but got hopelessly stuck trying to depict them, and just gave up and gave us the shitty ending.
Ooh, yes. It’s not only slow, but damned dreary. At first. And that’s necessary to provide contrast and context.
Exam-
Basically a sci fi 12 Angry Men, the ending is laughable! I didn’t end up hating the movie, but the pay off on the test was horrible. Also the room is the only set, if you were watching hoping to see more of the world outside forget it.
I sat through Stealth for about 30 minutes, then took the disk out and send it back to Netflix.
I love that movie as well. When it came out, I was talking to my cinephile roommate about it and he went on and on about how stupid the third act was. I was kind of smug about it and pointed out that the third act is supposed to be stupid “and here’s why…”
Then awhile later I found out my parents saw and asked them what they thought. They thought it was “kind of so-so until at the end when it really picked up and got exciting.”
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for me. I tried watching it once but got so bored in the first 10 or 20 minutes that I just gave up. I kept hearing how GREAT it was and all that, and finally FORCED myself to suffer through the beginning of it, and yes, it was WELL worth it. Certainly the best Jim Carey movie ever made (though I suppose that’s not saying much).
I loved Stealth! It’s horrible, but entertainingly so.
Troll Hunter starts slowly, without much promise. My brother and I kept looking at each other and asking why we were watching it. By the end, it had been funny, involving, and ultimately quite moving.
Odd. I didn’t find it slow at all. And I agree that it’s one of the best, if not the best, film. It’s certainly in my top ten, and I re-watched it formy birthday recently.
I don’t find the opening of this next one dull, although others might. But it certainly pays off to keep watching the mystery movie The Last of Sheila, which I’ve recommended several times on this Board. You have to watch the setup before you can understand the solution(s).
Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead. They start slow and build the environment first before stepping into the action. If you walk in and only watch the first 10 minutes and then get pissed because no one is screaming and running yet, the problem isn’t the movie…
Saw, two men wake up in a public loo, chained to the wall, with a dead body on the floor zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Don’t know what happened, don’t care (don’t want to know either), still amazed they made a series of Saw movies.
Mystery Men. Starts off making no sense (certainly if you’ve not seen it before) Mr Furious at the scrap yard WTF? Fight with the Redeyes, why is that guy throwing forks? Casanova Frankenstein in the loony bin WTFF?
Gets to the try-outs and it finally starts to get its shit together.
I loved it. It took its time getting going, but once it did it was awesome.
It might not fit, but the first 20 minutes of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was very slow and contemplative, but boy was your patience rewarded if you stuck around.
2001: A Space Odyssey may be considered a classic, but it’s horrible. It starts off slow. Then it’s followed by slow, more slow, a lot of nothing happening, and then nothing. Something like 90 minutes in it actually develops things like plot and characters, but then it spazzes out with random imagery and metaphorical nonsense.
It’s Kubrick’s worst work by far. Which is ironic, because it’s often hailed a masterpiece and considered his best. Here the imagery and camera tricks were the only thing present, but drawn out to ridiculous levels. It’s his most self-indulgent waste, because there’s really nothing worth seeing except HAL 9000. Ac ertain kind of snobbish film lover will roundly declare to those who hate the film that, “You jsut didn’t get it.” But the plain fact is that there really isn’t much too get in the first place. Kubruck raises fairly bland questions, has nothing of interest to say about them, and then handwaves it with some fancy imagery precisely because he doesn’t have anything to say. And of all his work, it’s the one most selectively remembered, because almost everyone.
While I don’t always agree with Confused Matthew, he has a really excellent and deliciously cruel look at this movie, along with an analysis, not of what the movie said or did (because there wasn’t much) but a look at what Kubrick wanted to accomplish, what even his friends and supporters grudgingly admitted (i.e., that he pretty much failed in a very interesting way) and that nobody tried to do the same thing and for very good reason.
I would also mention Citizen Kane as a good example. It does take a little while to get going, but it’s a really fascinating charactes study as well as being a groundbreaking film. It helps to understand how it changed movies, but it’s enjoyable on its own sake. I would say that it could be cut down a bit and not lose anything, but that was an issue of early moviemaking not being quite as experienced in editing techniques as today. Plus, with *The Hobbit[/I ]clocking in as ridiculously long as it is, it’s not a lesson that been universally learned anyhow.
I love Adaptation, too. When watching it the first time, I “got it” pretty quickly when it flew off the rails and I had a huge grin on my face (when I wasn’t laughing) during those last scenes. I know some people think it tried too hard to be clever, but it’s one of those great “aha!” moments when you realize what’s going on.
Oh my god, yes.
*Solaris *is an peculiar case, because the action actually picks up quite a lot (relatively speaking) in the second part of the movie, once the main character actually arrives at the space station. Everything from that point onwards ranks among my favorite pieces of cinema ever. Of course, to get that far, you first have to suffer through the fantastically boring opening which takes place on Earth, culminating in the notorious highway sequence, which seems to just go on forever. I really think that the first hour could have been squeezed into about five minutes, and the movie would have been none the poorer for it. Then again, Tarkovsky was a genius filmmaker, and I’m not, so what do I know.
I have heard that Tarkovsky would make the build-up in his movies so gawd-awfully slow in order to make sure that the less appreciative audience members left the theater before the real action started. Don’t know if it’s true, or why he would do that, but Solaris, at least, feels a bit like that.