The Hypnotist, Anna Biller's 44 minute spoof of old Hollywood Technicolor films, was beautifully shot. Much better movie that I expected. A dying rich guy forces his three adult children who hate each other to live together permanently if they want to inherit his money. They plot against each other, one bringing in a hypnotist. It would have been so easy to do badly.
Exemplifies my conviction that low budget feature films should be scaled back to about forty minutes. Ninety minute movies are unnecessarily long in this era of streaming video. If you're not going out to a movie theater, there's no reason to drag them out that long. And even if you are showing them theatrically, two forty minute movies will be better than one eighty minute one if your working on an extremely small budget.
Up until the '50's, low budget B movies were often only an hour long. And that was plenty long. I've seen B westerns from the '30's that were less than 50 minutes, and they were pretty good, not so much because they were shorter but because they were more violent and seemed be aimed at adults. I've never seen any point in singing cowboys.
Available on The Criterion Channel
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