Despite its shrewd bits, this slim book also has longueurs and repetitions, and Ballard's prose had lost, by the end, a bit of its elastic snap.
The cut was two hours and five minutes, and had longueurs, but on the whole it was spooky, funny, and absorbing.
The two-plus-hour version of the movie that's showing in theatres has longueurs that invite the mental version of clipping one's nails, but the half-hour supercut of the movie's best action scenes and a bit of connective tissue would be an anthology to remember.
They have their longueurs, the occasional laugh or dramatic moment, but above all, lots of different scenes.
The conferences at Casablanca, Tehran, Yalta and so on, which can have their longueurs, here sparkle with wit and insight, especially into the behaviour of Stalin.
But "Olympia" (three and a half hours long) and "Triumph of the Will" (two) both have their longueurs: endless scenes of shotputting and pole-vaulting in the former, of ranting and marching in the latter.
Almost all long books have their longueurs – few readers are riveted by every single page of War and Peace – but here, the slow passages are not just slow, but stonily inert.
The huge structure can have its longueurs, and a less than careful performance can make you think wistfully of the days when conductors routinely cut swathes from the symphony and took more than 20 minutes off the playing time.
"The Beat Hotel" has its longueurs.
