It's a Good Thing Movie Theaters Don't Charge by the Minute

Lord bless Woody Allen. His new movie, the charming "Sweet and Lowdown," is only 95 minutes long--that's a fraction of the length of most other holiday movies, in fact less than half the running time of two prominent ones. For my money, it's a better value than most of them. For some reason, though, critics keep referring to it as "slight."

Starring Sean Penn as a dishonorable guitarist--the world's second-best, as he keeps telling people--the movie is a swift-moving comedy that also happens to be about creativity and its relationship to moral character. As movie subjects go, that would seem a worthy theme.

Still, they say it's "slight."

That could be because it's a comedy--comedies never get the same respect as dramas. Or maybe it's because the film is so easy to digest. (Since Ingmar Bergman's great, despairing works pierced our consciousness in the 1950s, we've equated cinematic depth with suffering; Allen's own self-consciously "serious" films are proof that he does it, too.)

I fear, though, that one reason "Sweet and Lowdown" strikes so many people as minor is that it's short. Not terribly long ago, an hour and a half was considered the average length of a Hollywood movie. In recent years, to the chagrin of smokers, those of us with small bladders and sufferers of ADD, we've come to think of two hours as normal. But after a bumper crop of butt-numbingly looooong movies in 1998, the films released this holiday season are setting new benchmarks for eye fatigue.

Two of them are more than three hours long--"The Green Mile" and "Magnolia," both three hours, eight minutes. And I count 20 new and recent movies that are longer than two hours. They include: "Topsy Turvy" (2:41), the Chinese film "Emperor and the Assassin" (2:41), "Any Given Sunday" (2:40), "The Insider" (2:38), "Anna and the King" (2:28), "Angela's Ashes" (2:25), "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc" (2:21), "45 Up" (2:20), "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (2:19), "Titus" (2:19), "Ride With the Devil" (2:18), "Bicentennial Man" (2:13), "The Cradle Will Rock" (2:12), "Liberty Heights" (2:08), "The World Is Not Enough" (2:08), "Girl, Interrupted" (2:07), "Snow Falling on Cedars" (2:06), "Dogma" (2:05), "The Hurricane" (2:05) and "Cider House Rules (2:04). And that's only in the last two months.

Some longer-than-average movies earn their epic length. The "Godfather" movies--take your pick--could not have been told in an hour and a half, for example. And everyone knows of the cases where studios have yanked good but long movies away from their directors and ruined them by making cuts.