Perhaps you have seen the trailer for 88 Minutes, the Al Pacino film being released in the United States on April 18. Or perhaps you live in one of the dozen or so countries where the film has been out on DVD for more than a year and have actually seen the whole movie. Doesn't matter. The point is, the film is set up with this premise: Pacino's character, a forensic psychologist who has testified against serial killers, gets an ominous phone call telling him he has 88 minutes to live. The rest of the movie, we are led to understand, comprises those 88 minutes.
Now, as it turns out, the movie is not exactly in real time. Pacino's 88 minutes only take up 76 minutes of the movie, so there's a little bit of skipping ahead. But still, it's pretty close, and it reminds me of an important fact:
I love it when things are in real time!
When it comes to action dramas, real time is a great way to convey the urgency of the situation. Where some movies would jump ahead to the climax, a real-time drama lets things unfold naturally, making it feel more, well, real. It also draws the audience into the protagonist's world, because he doesn't do anything that we aren't privy to.
So I'm delighted when a movie has huge chunks of real time, such as a continuous 10-minute action scene, or a lengthy and heated debate between two characters. I love TV's 24, at least in general. They make some pretty egregious errors against real-time logic, like allowing Jack Bauer to drive anywhere in L.A. in no more than 10 minutes, but still. It's a great concept. Episodes of TV shows as varied as ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have used the real-time format to great effect.
It works for comedy, too. Remember the great Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld? Twenty-two minutes of real-time nothingness. Seinfeld co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus went on to do a comedy called Watching Ellie, where every episode was 22 minutes of real time in the life of the main character. (Steve Carell and Peter Stormare were also in it.) It was funny, but nobody watched it.
I wish more movies took advantage of this format, but I can see why they don't. True, some of the most famous examples -- 12 Angry Men, High Noon, Rope -- are great films. But then you also have clunkers like Johnny Depp's Nick of Time, which leans on the real-time format like a crutch. And that's the temptation, to use it as a gimmick to prop up a lackluster story. If you announce up front that your movie's in real time and that something will occur after a certain length of time has passed, it gives bored audiences a way to count down the minutes until it's over. You don't want that.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
