this post used to be much longer

I just saw Total Recall a few days ago, pretty much on impulse. I had no expectation that it would be a great cinematic experience and it wasn’t, but it was entertaining.

Among its virtues (which are several), one thing I liked was that it was only 109 minutes long.

The primary reason I’m not rushing out to see the new Batman movie is that I wasn’t very impressed by the two which came before it. I don’t remember anything about the first one, other than that there was a monorail thing and a bomb was going to go off. With the second one, I mostly remember Heath Ledger (which seems to be what most people remember). But a secondary reason I’m not planning to see it (until it’s on DVD) is that it’s 164 minutes long. That is, if I calculate correctly, two hours and 44 minutes long. Which is pretty damn long for a movie.

As I’ve talked about before, I’m reading Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, which is over 1,000 pages long. I’m a little over a third of the way through, and I already have the idea that when I get to the end I will think it could have been significantly shorter. I never thought that about V. or Mason & Dixon (both of which are long, though not as long as Against the Day). Actually, I never thought it about Gravity’s Rainbow either. I don’t like the ending of GR, but that’s a bad-ending problem, not a book-too-long problem.

I’m not against long books or movies as a matter of principle. The Lord of the Rings movies were mostly fine, even in the longer DVD versions. The theatrical versions had pretty much no padding at all, and the extended versions added some really good scenes (and some fluff, too). The book is long, too, and that’s just fine as well.

Some people value length for its own sake, though I think this applies to books more than movies. I believe this is related to genre, too. I think some fantasy fans like a really long book, but I’ve never met a mystery fan who felt that way.

With me, short is a positive, not a negative. When I was writing Stevie One, one of my main goals was to keep it short. A Sane Woman was under 45,000 words, and my goal was to keep Stevie One about that length. Instead, it came in at just over 30,000 words. I felt like pumping my fist in the air and going, “Yeah!” (Actually, it is possible that I did do that.)

So, what do you think? Is more better? Does less equal more?