Time, gentlemen, please

Benicio Del Toro – a man who has been crying out for some revitalising moisturiser to dab on those eye bags of his for ages now, someone have a word – won the prize for best actor at the Cannes film festival this weekend. However, my suspicions are that his winning had little to do with his acting ability and more to do with making it through a film that lasts one sixth of a day.

That’s 258 minutes of movie; four hours and 18 minutes of stuffing popcorn down your gob until you become incapable of chewing because your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth. The film, Guerrilla, is a biopic of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara – so there is, granted, a lot of subject matter. Then again, when Mel Gibson made Passion Of The Christ he managed to wrap up the somewhat convoluted story of the Son of God in 127 minutes, so you’ve got to ask questions (not to give the short-arsed, anti-Semitic cock any undue credit, of course).

Steve Soderbergh isn’t the first director to launch himself headfirst into long-winded waters. Peter Jackson has made an art form of fantastical faffing: The Return Of The King clocked in at 201 minutes, while the more recent King Kong ran it close at 187 minutes. Martin Scorsese doesn’t raise an eyebrow (though that may be because moving what amount to a couple of small animals with the flick of a facial muscle is no mean feat) at getting all epical on our arses. For example, watching Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs Of New York and The Aviator in one sitting would amount to 11 hours of foul-mouthed, Rolling Stones-backed visuals, not to mention far too much exposure to Leonardo Di Caprio.

There’s a tradition here: 1959’s Ben Hur went round and round for 212 minutes while even further back, Gone With the Wind keeps you hanging on for nearly all of it’s 233 minutes before coughing up the one scene that, frankly, anyone gives a shit about, and that came out in 1939.

The list – appropriately – goes on. What is it that makes the likes of Francis Ford Coppola want to give the Corleones nearly nine hours to tell their three-part tale, or Oliver Stone give Marlon Brando an extra 40 minutes to witter on in Apocalypse Now Redux? Wasn’t two and a half hours in the original version more than enough?

Perhaps the director in each case feels that the only way they can allow their films to breathe, to fulfil their artistic destiny, is to sit back in the edit suite and let the cutting board lay silent; perhaps they all have very small penises and are seeking cinematic compensation. Either way, the award for the longest-ever major release goes to The Burning Of The Red Temple, a Chinese film that runs to a bum-numbing total of 27 hours. It was released in 18 parts between 1928 and 1931, mind you, which makes it slightly more bearable (if not making me any less sceptical as to the size of director Zhang Shichuan’s manhood). Here’s what really clinches it though: it’s a silent film. Genius. No words, just the sound of interminable snores.

DAN POOLE