Long Movies

I feel like lately all of the films I see are seriously lacking any emotion. It doesn't matter if it's a Hollywood movie, foreign film, or independent film. I'm literally counting the minutes, waiting for these movies to end because they're boring, and I don't care enough about how pretty or flashy they are to finish watching them.

It's not that any of the movies I've seen recently are bad movies per se. Lust, Caution, The Banquet, and No Country For Old Men had interesting concepts and were beautifully filmed. I liked I am Legend's idea and Will Smith's performance, but it just fell flat. Lord of the Rings trilogy isn't exactly recent, but it spawned a whole bunch of other similar fantasy movies that also left me snoring. I have mixed feelings about the Pirates of the Caribbean films, but let's just add the third one in the series to my list of long, flashy/emotionless snoozers.

One thing these movies all have in common is that they're ridiculously long. And yet, the longer run time isn't used to expand on characters or story. There's so much emphasis on special effects, accuracy (to history or a book), and artistry that the point of the movie gets lost. Instead of scenes where we can watch characters interact with one another or with their surroundings, we get half hour long scenes of CG animated ship battles or...an hour of elf/gnome/pig/whathaveyous battling for some reason that you can't remember OR....you get to watch 2 hours of a psychopathic killer roam the desert and city while incompetent policemen sit there and drone on about cats and dead fathers.

When I go to the movies, I want to see something that stirs some kind of emotion in me, that gives me a reason to be interested. So many 0f these long films...I feel like they try too hard to be meaningful, artistic or epic. Sometimes I think they could better achieve these things by just keeping it simple.