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Eureka
How is it that Aoyama's Eureka, a movie that weighs in at 3 hours and 40 minutes,
doesn't seem that long? This is a movie which is at least twice the length
of most Hollywood movies and is two and a half times the length of a Disney
animated feature. So how is it even remotely bearable? Separate from the story,
which needs to be good, which is very good, there is the physical/psychological
limit on our attention span. To cite the long, sometimes unmoving scenes and
say that the movie is slow paced is a little off the mark.
Rather, the lengthening of the scenes, of all the scenes, gives the viewer
no short scenes to compare to, no other frame of reference. As a result, when
we come to rest on a profile view of two people and watch their entire exchange
over a course of many minutes (this breaks the "rule" of entering
a scene as late as possible and leaving it as early as possible) it feels completely
normal. Time is passing as it should, in long continuous phrases. Strangely,
stretched taut in this way, things are laid bare. There are no folds to hide
behind. Story development in Eureka then, is not slow, but prolonged.
Which is why a poorly executed short fast action film can be both so
tiring and seem so long. The fast cuts, the MTV style editing, leaves
no room to breathe. 90 minutes passes and it feels like an eternity. Time moves
at different rates depending on circumstance. And when you consider that race
car drivers experience this time compression/expansion to an extreme -- at 250
MPH seconds are seemingly stretched into minutes -- it makes their efforts Herculean
in relation, a couple hundred laps of concentration being a lifetime
to them.
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