Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny Makarov
That would be Blade Runner.
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Nah, Blade Runner is a bit on the slow side, but not even close to the glacial pace of even something like many modern indie dramas, let alone some classics of art house cinema. Aki Kaurismäki's Match Factory Girl has the first piece of dialogue at about 30 minutes into the movie, and it's two lines. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is also a LOT slower, and longer, than Blade Runner.
If you want to see REALLY slow movies, check out Andrei Tarkovskis filmography. Many of them are genuine classics, but they are truly really slow films.
As for older movies in general being slower, that's also just blatantly not true on average. Modern movies usually have more cuts per minute, but other than that many modern films are quite moderately paced when it comes to things like length of scenes, pace of dialogue and how fast character arcs develop in terms of overall screen time. Words of dialogue per minute is very often quite low these days. Go watch something like Casablanca and take note just how fast people talk, and then consider how long Keanu Reeves can take to say "woah"
There's also probably more screen time with no dialogue now, as films have more and longer transition shots and establishing scenes and action scenes have become a LOT longer. There's less montages now though than there were in the eighties.
Many older films are also based in plays rather than books, which is why they often had a ton of dialogue compared to many modern films (and also less filler-dialogue such as people talking to cashiers or cab drivers.)
In general people's attention spans have more likely gone up rather than down, as all our entertainment has become longer and longer. Books are much longer on average, TV episodes have gone from 20+ minutes with commercial breaks to 60 minutes without commercial breaks, and movies have have added an average of something like 30+ minutes of runtime. The same story that took 86 minutes in the black and white era now easily takes up ~120 minutes. Blade Runner Director's Cut is 116 minutes, while Blade Runner 2049 is 163 minutes.
Even songs on the radio have gone up in average length by more than a minute.
(Spotify of course is dominated by really short songs, but that's more about Spotify.)