h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

For all of you who thought King Kong was too long - he's bringing out an 'extended edition' dvd in November - 3 1/2 hours of it this time

I can see where you're all coming from when you say PJ's recent films have been too long - but personally I find it interesting the way film-making has changed... Over the last 20(ish) years films have gotten faster and faster, character development and exposition has been left on the cuttingroom floor just to pander to the audience's inability to concentrate.

Maybe the question should be Why do we find King Kong too long? Is it because it's badly made or is it because we've grown used to modern films racing along at a much higher pace, and we've grown used to filling in superficial characters ourselves in our imagination because the filmmaker hasn't had the time.

Maybe the three-hour film is a view of the future of the film industry... Either that or in another ten years our films will all be ultra-condensed 60 minutes of action, with a standardised set of wooden characters, taken straight out of the box and placed in front of a camera.

I have a pretty simple test for whether a film is to long.

If it starts to lose my interest then it's too long. I've sat through works by Tarkovsky and Ozu that make Jackson look like a speedy action director and they didn't bore me, so I have to conclude that Jackson's movies are too long. I also sat through 3 and whatever hours of Dances with Wolves and wasn't bored, so length in and of itself is not boring.

BUT Return of the King has a bum-numbingly pointless final half hour that would test the patience of a saint *AND* misses the point of the book entirely.

King Kong has a bum-numbingly pointless HOUR before the action even gets to Skull Island - I got the point - the heroine is apenniless actress and Jack Blacks character is spineless bum - after ten minutes. As for most of the sequences on the boat, oh god I have no idea what they were about. It then has a bum-numbingly pointless 27 minute fight between Kong andf three T-Rex's (solely on the grounds that three is better thasn the original one and the longer the better). It then has a brain sapping final denouement atop the Empire State which had me and at least one other person in the cinema going - 'Oh get on and die you b*st*rd'. It is a cinematic dud of overwhelming pretension and idiocy which is treated like a masterpiece because 'Peter Jackson has made a film three hours long so it must be good'.

No. Jack Willis and co told *exactly* the same story, with *exactly* the same point in 87 minutes. It's tighter, better constructed, better written and has better defined characters.

You've got a point whisky the necessity for films to compress so much in such a short space often leads to some scenes feeling too long (Batman Begins has frantic pace, but theres a few scenes with the girl whose name I cant remember that lead it to drag in points).

I'll be interested to look at a film 30 years from now in comparison to a film 30 years ago - I have a feeling the pacing and context information (or lack there of) might be the same. By not saying enough, Firefly became massively popular, although that doesnt over pass onto films...