The MoFo Movie Club Discussion: Citizen Kane

I definitely got a belly laugh when Leland said this about Kane:

"I suppose he had a private sort of greatness, but he kept it to himself."

I told my wife that from now on I was going to use this to describe myself.

It's a funny line, also, because once you've called his greatness "private" it's not really necessary to indicate that he kept it to himself.

BTW, CK is on TCM (the cable station) this evening. It is followed by The Third Man.

Sounds like an Orson-athon.

I think it'd be amusing to air all his classics in order of weight gain. Start with Kane, end with Touch of Evil. And maybe that wine commercial, just for the heck of it.

Johnny Carson gag about Welles' wine commercial:

"He wiill eat no cow before its time."

Stumbled across a quasi-interesting essays on this film: Citizen Kane: Biography and the Unfinished Sentence. It's okay, if a little pretentious and needlessly dense, with sentences like "His struggle is characterised by the anonymity imposed on individuality by the contingencies of the objective world, and an autonomous sense of interiority." Yeow. I wish that sentence had been unfinished.

Anyway, might be of interest to some of you guys.

Reading it also made me think of something that might have been said already: the disparity between the number of people who had something to say about him, and the number who actually knew him well enough to know what "Rosebud" meant. Obviously, the idea that nobody really knew him is a well-tread one, but I feel it's painted a bit brighter when juxtaposed with the idea that so many people had something to say about him. As if the way he was known--very little by many--was completely backwards from the more meaningful way of being know--very much by few.

What is your greatest desire? What is your purpose? These are just some of the elements of your being that Citizen Kane sets its scopes on before leaving you with the ever fleeting, 'What if?'. A powerful original soundtrack guides you through the life of one of the wealthiest men on Earth who acquires everything he has ever wanted (or so it seems). The cinematography is exceptional for the time period. Orson Welles utilizes some very unique camera shots. Some sets were quite beautiful, there were lots of cool doors. The star door was my favorite.. Orson was a true visionary to be able to Write/Produce/Direct and star in his own vision. I feel this movie has more to be soaked up out of it by my brain in a future dunk.

7.5/10

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MY MOVIE RANKINGS

After all that praise you only gave it a c plus rating?

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You can put all your reviews under one thread.

A 7.5 is a B+ for me. We have several threads about Kane.

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I merged this review with one of our Movie Club discussion threads. And yeah, most of the classics have at least one thread about them already.

In the 1940's, yeah I probably would have given it a 10, but in 2013, 7.5 which is good that it can still score that high in the newer generation.

We need neg rep for the previous post.

I am not actually a huge fan of Citizen Kane, but what contemporary movies are so superior to Citizen Kane?

My reply appears to have been lost in the transistion so I will repeat the essence.

Is this the way you grade as a teacher?

I don't know what to say. This is just plain ridiculous.

Why should older movies automatically be rated lower in the present?

I don't want to defend someone using a Guapo () argument, but a lot more movies (at least 35,000 American ones alone) have been made since Kane, so the average movie from 1941 would deserve a lower comparative rating. For example, the 50th best of all-time back then probably wouldn't place in the top 250 now. However, the closer the movie was rated to #1 then, the better chance it has of being rated higher now (taking into consideration how people's tastes change and their knowledge of many movies). Just sayin'. But if you look at my ratings you'd say I'm prejudiced towards older English-language films, so what do I now?

Yes, but then you're talking about relative ratings. I'm talking about absolute number ratings, like his 7.5/10.

I think those would have to go down also the more movies you see and are made. Perhaps the very best won't go down, but most will. They certainly have for me, and I've been using my system and tweaking my ratings for almost 40 years.

I realize that I may actually be arguing a different point than the other poster.

Yeah, let's rate it 0/10 because it's black'n'white. -_-

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I've answered that in detail too many times to do it again, but no, the numerical system I use for both have completely different uses and meanings. The letter grade ratings are comparable though. For example, 7.5 does not equal 75%, but a B+ film is comparable to a B+ paper.