I know it's incredibly primitive to measure the worth of an artwork by how much of it there is... and there are times when I get bored of songs half-way through, but at the same time, paying hundreds of pounds for something as short as this... yeah, I hear you.
In the same way, I don't get the moaning about long films. If I go to the cinema and stick my tenner or whatever down and it turns out to be three hours long then that's fine by me. With these long form tv series that we are all extremely familiar with, we expect many expanded characters and complex plots as a matter of course. As a matter of fact, now that TV shows have really gone into much deeper characterisation etc, I sometimes feel on coming out of a film that there were not enough people involved or things were rushed and so if making films longer can help improve that then they should go for it.
If every minute is good and necessary than I'm happy to get three hours of entertainment rather than two, in the same way as when you paid a nugget or whatever to go on the dodgems when the Unfair came to town, I'd rather have three minutes for my money than two.
I suppose I'm mixing two points cos they both work in the same direction
1. If there is a film in which I love every minute, then please give me lots of minutes
2. If I come out of a film and it's ninety minutes long, say, and at the end I think "That character could have been more developed" or "that plot was rushed" I will certainly think to myself, why the fuck didn't they just add in those necessary things and it made the film forty minutes longer so what?
I don't get people saying they can't concentrate that long or they get a number bum*. And if it is really long then have an interval.
I also think that my posts often have so many points in them that I really do need to make them very very long, what I'm doing right now is definitely not in any sense what some might mistakenly label as waffling or a lack of concision, it's a deliberate choice to maximize the amount of wisdom I generously choose to impart, and if I repeat myself or say the same thing twice in different ways to add emphasis and to make the point more emphatically then it should not be confused for any sort of drug addled wittering that just goes on and on and, in fact, on, rather it is in fact something quite other than what it might appear to those with short attention spans, in fact this particular bit is merely a test to see if anyone can demonstrate the required concentration to keep battling onwards through the challenging word salad that I have created like a sort of chef using words as fruit. I guess 'the' would maybe be a tomato if it was a fruit and 'and' might be a red pepper cos I love red peppers, but come to think of it what would be onion and garlic, two of the main ingredients of almost every dish I create? I don't really know to be honest, but I'm realising now that filibustering is a genuine skill, do they just do it off the cuff, and is there any rule like if they pause for more than say ten seconds - or is that too harsh - should it be more like twenty seconds? - they have to stop? And what's to stop someone just reading from a book or something or is there a rule that they have to stay on topic, it's kind of like that game show they have on radio four where it beeps if they say certain words, which when you think about it is kinda just like a grown up version of that thing with Timmy Mallet when he said mustn't pause, mustn't hesitate now look at each other and say blah, do you remember that, I'm not sure the radio four one is actually better. Mornington Crescent is quite good though although I must say it took me a long time to understand some of the more complex rules of that game. I was never sure if Mornington Crescent was a real place or not until I moved to London but it is. Who is that artist actually and he painted like a hundred no perhaps a thousand views of Mornington Crescent, and they were all almost the same, it was so weird, one time we paid like fifteen quid to see his exhibition at the Royal Academy and to all intents and purposes it was room after room with every wall covered with the same painting like ten views here, Mornington Crescent at 10am and then it was ten views of Mornington Crescent at maybe 10.05am, it was a pretty boring exhibition to be honest.
The main point really though when you think about it is that mixed biscuits is really such a fucking wanker I don't even find it funny any more, I wonder if he finds himself funny or just a sad tragic figure talking utter bollocks because it is the persona he has created for himself and he does not know how to escape from it, part of me would almost feel sorry for him I guess although there is a certain pleasure to be gleaned in the way that his crime has actually become his punishment.
So yeah, there you have it, an argument which I'm sure you will all agree is completely watertight in favour of the longer work over the short. At least where necessary, though of course it does become less necessary when the import diminishes, which is a tautology I guess, or is it a truism? And what is the difference between a tautology and a truism? And how can you have an equinox, surely equine means horse doesn't it, is an equinox therefore a word which contains a kind of self-contradictory phrase, and does that make it a paradox or is it simply sophistry?
Where was I? Ah, just need to go for a wee and then I can get into the main body of this post. Apologies for breaking off so abruptly.... to be continued... very shortly... but at length if you see what I mean... and surely I mean what I see... anyway, I should reiterate that I will continue... (cont)
*Of course that should have said numb bum, but I like the phrase number bum so I have left it as is. I did not want to spoil the tautness of my writing above