Quote:
Originally Posted by Secret Fawful
Citizen Kane - 5/11 - Technically skillful. Would have preferred it as a book. I'll probably spend months figuring out all of my problems with it.
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I'm sorry, but there are some points that can't just be "stated" like that. To just say "Citizen Kane Sucks" without backing is to just sound blindly arrogant. The film is considered to be great by pretty much everyone who knows their shit in terms of cinema. Why do you think that is? Do you think they're all wearing rose-colored glasses, or sitting in some monocle club that you are far too great to ever join?
Also, you say it's "technically skillful", but then say it would have worked better as a book. What? That doesn't make any sense. You can't write
this shot, you can't write deep focus, the excellent score, the fantastic effects, the elaborate sets meant to communicate as much to the viewer as the fucking words, or many of the things that make Citizen Kane an almost objectively incredible film. To just walk in and say "I don't like it, that is all, goodnight" is just to kick up shit just for the sake of kicking up shit.
Citizen Kane is a miracle of cinema. You have a score by Bernard Hernman(who later would write scores for Psycho and other Hitchcock films, Taxi Driver, and The Twilight Zone), cinematography by game-changer Gregg Toland, a screenplay by Herman J. Mankiewicz(whose witty and satirical style of humor came to
define an era, on top of being fucking hilarious), and a cast and crew that brought with them a diverse range of knowledge in terms of design from a range of creative disciplines including radio and the stage play, which is part of the reason why Citizen Kane is such a strongly dialog-driven film(but, due to other aspects, is also hardly something that could be done without major and regrettable loss in radio, stage, or book formats). Fuck, I'm not even scratching the SURFACE of why this film is so great. The AFI didn't say it was the greatest American film as some sort of joke, or due to some academia version of peer pressure. There are damn-near objective reasons to call this film one of the greats. Greatest? Maybe, maybe not, but it sure as Hell deserves better than a fucking 45%.
But perhaps it's not entirely your fault. Citizen Kane was never meant to be seen on a screen the size of your average television computer monitor. Modern films are often framed so that they will perform just as well on video as they do in theaters, which was a non-factor in the time of Citizen Kane. I've known people who never really appreciated the film until they've seen it on a large enough screen, because this film? It's fucking DENSE. And I mean that in the best possible way, the film is layered, intelligent, and almost playfully communicative. The details are so prevalent that it's one of those films that makes you say "Wow, I noticed a new thing every time I watch it".
This film is not only a great movie, it's an American treasure, and it deserves a great deal of respect and value, far more than your three small-sentence blurb gave it.