I feel like established directors should really hold onto editors. Did The Batman need to be 3 hours? Hell no. Does Oppeneheimer? Probably not. Am I going to see Killers of the Flower Moon knowing it's 3 and a half? Yeah, I'll wait for that shit to go to streaming.

Barbie clocked under two hours, and it was an existential examination on what it means to be a human. It was efficient, effective, and entertaining as hell. The more I think about it, the more I love it. I truly wasn't expecting this reaction. I'm the most basic, white, hetero guy you can imagine. Shit, half my personality is just "golf." But this movie. Damn. It shook me to my core. I'm not even really talking about the feminist part, that was just preaching to the choir (although America Ferrera NAILED her monologue, and Gosling easily deserves the Oscar for playing the idiot scumbag). I'm talking about the last 15 minutes. I never expected a fucking Barbie movie to make the concept of death seem beautiful.

We've been dealing with a pretty rough death in our personal lives, and this movie was like a tidal wave of perspective. Death is why life matters so much. In the natural world, we're incredibly privileged to know it's going to happen. We can use that knowledge to make the most of life. Every day matters to us because we don't know for sure if there will be another one.

I mean it when I say I love you all.

All this because of a fucking Barbie movie. Give Greta Gerwig the rights to Transformers you fucking cowards


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in reply to @Hester2524's post:

I remember having a hard time with the lord of the rings' theatrical releases woth their runtime, I skipped the batman for its length and I'm afraid oppenheimer will make me fall asleep. I think 120 minutes is more than enough to tell a story, if your movie is longer maybe you should review your script

Batman and Oppie were both incredible, fully justified their run time, and I will absolutely be seated in October with an overpriced movie theater jack and coke for all 206 minutes of Killers of the Flower Moon 😂

I'm sure I'll see Barbie at some point. Glad folks are enjoying it. Seems like it was very successful at what it set out to do, and Gerwig is a great director. Will be interested to see what she does next.

Maybe I jumped the gun on Oppenheimer considering I haven't seen it, but I do feel like The Batman could have done with a little editing. I feel very strongly that if you need 3 hours to make a good Batman/Superman/Justice League/Avengers/etc movie, you may need to go back to the drawing board.

It probably also doesn't help that I'm getting kind of tired of Batman movies being "films." Sure, it was cool the first couple times Nolan did it. I'm just ready for some fun utility belt, weird villains, cheesy, comic-booky good times that recognize how ridiculous the concept is. I'm not saying I want it to be a Marvel style action-comedy. I just want the Animated Series in live action. That's why I can't wait for the Gunn-verse movie. If they're truly adapting Batman and Son, or anything from the Morrison run, I'm gonna be tickled pink.

Don't get me wrong, I loved The Batman. It's competing with the original Burton film as my third favorite (first two being TDK and Returns, unless we count Phantasm, in which case put that right after TDK). And those are all real close, like in golf terms they're all one stroke apart from each other

I think we're looking for opposite things out of this IP ultimately. I loved BTAS and Beyond, but I loved them as animated series that were primarily targeted towards children. They made the best of that framework, but the constraints of a live action PG-13 film aiming to make 3/4 of a billion at the box office would work to their detriment, not their benefit.

I didn't care for the tone or style of the Burton/Keaton films at all. I don't think they've aged well and they come off super campy to me. Even more so with the Adam West stuff. Nolan/Bale was the first time I felt like they adapted the IP to live action properly. Snyder/Affleck was a huge step back but Reeves/Pattinson righted the ship for me. It's honestly one of my favorite films in years, not just CBMs. Every minute of its runtime was earned for me... except for the inclusion of The Joker. You wanna edit some time out, edit him.

For the foreseeable future I'm kinda pretending the Gunn stuff doesn't exist. I don't want a 2hr 15min advertisement for Batman in Mechs Fighting Aliens, which is inevitability where all this Justice League crossover stuff goes. So long as he leaves Reeves (and Phillips) alone to do their things, I'm fine tho.