A Two Part Post, Part I: Bloated

One of the challenges of writing a story or creating a film is coming up with enough material - juts being productive enough to complete a story.  A bigger challenge, however, is trimming down that story and making it shorter, because many scripts and stories are filled with a lot of extra lines that the writer is in love with, but the audience doesn't really care about.  One of the first things I learned in my film classes was to cut things out, to make it shorter, shorter, shorter.

So, while a 3-hour movie might be impressive if it has a truly worthy story to fill the time, usually it just means someone couldn't check themselves and cut down on their own self-serving content.  The Lord of the Rings
was really long, but it still had to cut out a lot of the content from it's source material.  King Kong was also really long... and it could have lost about an hour and a half of the film.  Which would have distinctly improved it.  Some films – I’m looking at you, Transformers 2 – are clearly just made for the flashy effects, and those should be even shorter, lacking that they are in a fulfilling storyline with real characters.