Pacing

Thanks to JeanG3nie for their thoughts on my thoughts on the Spider-verse.

JeanG3nie’s response

Pacing is a topic that I have paid particular attention to, through the eyes of my kids, and precisely because I agree: slow pacing can work extremely well as long as the payoff is there. It might be a payoff due to a slow build to something exciting—or simply a payoff from being slow paced and wonderful.

Modern life is so fast—so free of boredom by default—that kids these days don’t get a lot of exposure to slow pacing.

So, we try to inject a bit of productive boredom into our kids’ lives, and movies are a great way to do it. Old Disney movies, for example, are very much slower than most of today’s. JeanG3nie mentioned “Rear Window”, and that’s a favourite of ours too. I was mildly surprised when rewatching “Alien” with my daughter that it also falls into this category—it takes a very, very long time to “get going” by modern standards.

Over in the realm of gaming, “Baldur’s Gate” is a fine example of slow pacing. You start the game, which uses Dungeons & Dragons rules, as a clueless Level 1 character. I remember playing it as a kid and being utterly baffled by the fact that my character couldn’t seem to hit anything, died after a few scratches ... and that not much seemed to happen. Where was the game? It’s only five or ten hours in that you start to feel like you’re on an adventure—as opposed to just bumbling around getting lost. Eventually it turns into one of the most epic and rewarding gameplay arcs of all time, culminating in one of the best sequels of all time, the aptly named “Baldur’s Gate 2”.

Thinking of books that take a long time to get anywhere but turn out to be worth it, I suppose there are plenty to nominate by Neal Stephenson. “Cryptonomicon”, anyone?

I haven’t watched “Taxi Driver” yet, I will!

Here is a good one you might not have seen: “Kin-dza-dza! (1986)" , a darkly humorous sci-fi/fantasy about two Russians accidentally transported to a postapocalyptic world then trying to make their way home. The whole movie is currently available for free on YouTube:

Kin-dza-dza!

> ’Kin-dza-dza!’ is a 1986 science fiction production of the Soviet film studios Mosfilm, directed by Georgian director Georgiy Daneliya. If we didn’t know anything about this movie and if it was spoken in English we could classify it in the category of low-cost movies with a crazy script that combines the pretext of science fiction with absurd comedy and social criticism. For the informed spectator, ’Kin-dza-dza!’ is much more. 1986 is one of the first years of the democratization of the Soviet Union. Director Georgiy Daneliya, who had seen many of his previous films censored and other projects stopped before they were made, was one of the first to use the atmosphere of openness (’glasnost’ in Russian) to make a satirical and critical film about the Soviet society, the inequalities between the peoples of the USSR, the deprivation suffered by the population, the ecological disasters caused by forced industrialization. — dromasca on IMDb

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