Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen two movies I’ve liked but haven’t written in depth reviews for: The American and Never Let Me Go.  As I’ve been rolling over in my head why it’s been so hard to write about these movies, there’s one word I keep coming back to: slow. 

In the case of both movies, there was a deliberate storytelling technique (I’m assuming) to bring the audience into the story slowly.  I’d describe both movies as heavy character pieces; the ‘pay offs’ in the last act are worthwhile because you’ve spent so long learning about the behaviors of the main characters.  But the question I kept coming back to (in my head) was if I as a film geek consider these films slow, how do I convince Joe Public to see a movie that doesn’t have any ‘action’ until the halfway point? 

So I went back and thought about the ‘universally loved’ movies in recent memory: Inception and Avatar.  Both films are good for their own reasons, but now I’m wondering, are they the symbolic ‘changing of the guard’?  Is part of the reason we love these movies (on a subconscious level at least) is because as a culture everything is now so ‘instant’?  I refuse to believe there won’t be another film in the next couple years that eases us into the meat of the story, but my own admission, part of the appeal of Chris Nolan’s last two films (The Dark Knight being the other) is that even as I was watching it for the first time, there was a point where I said to myself, “Can I get a scene where nothing important really happens?”

The flip side to this argument is of course what television is doing now.  The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, and now Mad Men are four shows that were/are immensely popular in part because they are shows about characters we care more and more about with each episode.  We (as an audience) will give a television show we like, 100 hours to build toward a dramatic resolution.  We know when we walk into a movie theater we’re going to be there 3 hours tops, so we feel ‘cheated’ if for the first half or third, ‘nothing happens’.  Or so it seems these days.

Everything goes in cycles, but it’ll be interesting to see when (if?) filmmakers/audiences are willing to take their foot off the gas.  When the YouTube generation becomes not just the audience but the storytellers, what will happen then?

We shall see…