Padding the Runtime and The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) (2011)

There is a strange obsession that many filmmakers have with making their movies ninety minutes long.  If not ninety minutes long, they make it as close to that length as they possibly can.  It is frequently noticeable in bad movies as the writing is not strong enough to sustain the feature length, yet the director was so adamant that he or she forced the movie to that length.  This trend is one of the most irritatingly annoying trends in film and one that I want to take a look at this week.

The trend of scenes and shots meant to extend a movie is not something new.  It has been happening for many years.  Low-budget movies are the biggest culprits of this type of behaviour, but big budget movies have also been known to participate in this practice.  I haven’t seen the movie I’m about to mention, which is Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  I have heard about how much time the film spends showing the USS Enterprise travelling through space.  I’m sure the movie had a much larger budget than many of the movies that I will be discussing within this post.  That doesn’t change the fact that the one thing that I have heard about the first theatrical continuation of the franchise is how much of the movie is these filler exteriors.  Though, as I said, the biggest culprits of needless extensions in movies are within the lower budget areas.  That’s why I’m writing about it.

Before I get right into the post, I want to say that this week’s post is going to resemble last week’s post a lot.  Once again, I will be going through the history of the Sunday “Bad” Movies to select films to use as examples of the trend I’ll be writing about.  I’ll be looking at the movies that I remember watching for this blog that have notable scenes or shots that were used to extend the runtime of the movie that they were featured in without adding any substance whatsoever.  These are moments in the movies where you would stare at the screen and wonder when something was going to happen.  They feel like filler, and many times they actually are.  This is what the post will be.

I’m going to begin with a movie that I have seen at least six times.  I even wrote about having seen it that many times.  That would be the one that I watched for week 25, The Room.  If you don’t know what The Room is, I’m going to judge you harshly.  Mostly, I’m going to wonder how you could be reading a blog about bad movies and have never heard of The Room.  It, and the man behind it (Tommy Wiseau), are well known in the world of bad movies.  For those of you that have seen it, you’ll remember an exterior shot that stood out for how long it lasts.  You’ll also remember that it comes back throughout the film.  The shot is one of the Golden Gate Bridge.  The Room is set in San Francisco and Tommy Wiseau was not afraid to remind the audience of this fact many times.  It’s as though he thought the audience would forget about it.  The reason I chose to include it in this discussion is because of how much time is spent looking at the bridge in The Room.  This establishing shot has become a joke among the fans of the movie.  It slowly pans across the entire bridge.  Let me repeat the key word in that sentence: slowly.  If you ever see the movie in the theater with a bunch of people who know it, they shout “Go! Go! Go!” the entire ten seconds or so of the shot whenever it appears.  It is as much a part of the experience as football or the utensil art in Johnny’s apartment.  And it bulks the movie up in terms of runtime.

Another movie that padded time establishing something was a movie that appeared in the Sunday “Bad” Movies two weeks prior to The Room.  That movie was the great Miami Connection.  Now, this is slightly different as the scene I’m about to discuss wasn’t establishing a location, as so many of the other examples will.  Instead, it is a scene all about taekwondo.  If you watched Miami Connection at any point in your life, you probably know what scene I am talking about.  Basically, what happens is that the main characters spend a good five minutes of the movie practicing their favourite martial art.  It is not a montage or anything of that sort.  It is just five minutes straight of taekwondo practice at a glacial speed.  A few seconds of it are spent setting up something that happens in the climax, but most of it is spent with boring practice that is meant to make taekwondo look cool.  It tried to establish the martial art form as cool.  It forgot to make the scene worth the time spent watching it.

Back to exteriors and that kind of stuff, let’s fast forward to the 100^th week when I watched Birdemic: Shock and Terror.  It’s a movie that starts with an uneventful drive.  A long, uneventful drive.  Other highlights of the movie include repeated still shots of the sky with fake birds cawing, final credits over birds slowly flying away from the beach, a dancing scene that takes the time of an entire song and doesn’t have interesting dancing, and a few shots of birds dive bombing different locations and exploding.  The most extended moment of Birdemic isn’t any of these shots, though.  It is instead a scene in which a bunch of office workers are informed that the company has just been sold for a lot of money and they are now millionaires.  Director James Nguyen then cuts to each pair of employees, one after another, for five or ten seconds.  The employees clap.  It feels like it goes on forever.  Clapping followed by clapping, followed by even more clapping.  A never ending parade of people slamming their hands together.  There is no reason for all of this excess to be in the movie.  One shot of the entire room clapping about the news would have sufficed.  The only imaginable reasons for this scene to have been done this way were to extend the running time, or the filmmaker did not know what he was doing.  Either of those reasons seems reasonable in the case of Birdemic.

One of the more egregious movies that I’ve watched for the Sunday “Bad” Movies was a movie titled Science Crazed.  It rivaled Birdemic in terms of showing scenes of travel that did not need to be shown.  Where it surpassed Birdemic was that all of the scenes of travelling followed a shuffling serial killer.  A good fifteen minutes of the movie (at least that much) involved the killer shuffling through hallways on the way to his next scene of gruesome murder.  However, Science Crazed was much more than travel when it came to bumping up the runtime.  One of the murders involved two women working out in the gym.  Prior to the carnage that would ensue, we are witness to ten minutes of shuffling interspersed with boring exercise.  It added nothing to the movie outside of length.  Had the travel and workout been a mere two minutes, nothing in the story would have changed.  Come to think of it, the tension probably would have worked better because it wouldn’t have been worn thin.  The whole movie was made in this way, but that scene stands out the most as the worst offender of extension for extension’s sake.

Finally, we come to this week’s bad movie.  This is the movie that inspired me to write this post.  The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) was a long and boring movie that felt longer and exponentially more boring because of the establishing and extended shots in it.  These shots mostly focused on the interstellar travel that the characters were experiencing.  Yes, there was a time machine in the movie.  Yet most of the movie was spent with the two protagonists voyaging through space.  They went into the future, found a spaceship, and began a journey through the galaxy.  This journey was shown with shots of the poorly computer animated ship drifting through celestial landscapes (usually without land).  It would be four or five in a row before the movie went back to its boring dialogue.  The only other extended bit that really stood out (because there wasn’t much runtime left after the travel shots) was a scene with a belly dancer that felt like it would never end.  It was a five minute scene of terrible belly dancing while the two main characters drank in front of a green screen background.  You could easily tell that there was not enough script in The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) to constitute the feature length, but director Steven A. Sandt decided to make it that long anyway.  The extended shots and endless exterior traveling shots were how the director made it as long as it was.

I could go on and on about other movies that I have covered that made the same choice to use extensions and exteriors to build their runtime.  I’m not going to do that though.  This post has gone on long enough and you don’t need me to make it any longer.  It would just be me falling into the same trap as so many of the filmmakers who have been featured in this blog.  Having a feature length movie can be a nice thing.  Hell, I enjoy sitting down and being entertained for an hour and a half.  The problem is that sometimes the script does not have enough material to sustain that runtime.  This means that either a rewrite must be done to make it longer in a qualitative way or filler shots get added to make it longer in a quantitative way.  Many movies that I have seen resort to the quantitative method because it is quicker, cheaper, and easier.  It comes to the detriment of the film.  Had more time been put into some of the movies I mentioned above, they may have been better.  A rewrite could have made for a feature length film without the long, boring filler shots.  But the films are what they are.  So what are you going to do?

Here’s what you do.  You read these notes:

• The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) was suggested for the Sunday "Bad" Movies by @refocusedmedia.
• The Sunday “Bad” Movies I mentioned in this post were The Room, Miami Connection, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Science Crazed, and The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale).
• Another movie that came to mind that I didn’t write about was A Talking Cat!?!
• What are some movies that you think use exteriors, travelling shots, and that kind of stuff to pad their runtime?  Have you seen any of the movies I have mentioned?  Do you think The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) is as much a waste of time as I do?  There is a comments section below if you want to discuss anything.
• The comments section could also be used for suggestions on what I should watch for this blog.  I’m currently working on the schedule for weeks 126-150.  If you don’t want to suggest here, you can email me at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com or contact me on Twitter.
• Next week, the movie is the delightful The Hero of Color City.  Let me just say that it was better than I expected and the post is going to be an actual review.  So be ready for that.