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Thread: Citizen Kane

  1. #1
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    Citizen Kane

    I thought the film was a masterpiece. Amazing, revolutionary "Deep focus" cinematography that kept everything on screen in focus, this allows you to be completely immersed in the film because just like the real world you can focus on whatever the hell you want to.

    It was a film that worked on so many levels. The opening sequence had some kind of creepy, twisted nature to it, and the way the cinematography and soundtrack was used in this scene had me convinced I had picked up a horror movie by mistake. By the end of the film though it fit in with the tone, as the horror was there in Kanes loneliness.
    It worked as a thriller for the central Rosebud mystery, as a drama in the film style, but mostly as a fascinating character study into the effects of money. Seeing how Kane had everything materially and wanted more, highlighted perfectly with the way he tries to find some meaning in his life by trying to force his wife to be a successful singer, and also how she reacts to that pressure. It was ultimately this angle that tied the other angles together, as we find out what Rosebud is, and how it showed that even with all his success, he was never happy after he gave up his childhood innocence. Perfectly spoofed by The Simpsons, with Mr. Burns I might add.

    I also liked how the film was ambiguous and left some factors unanswered. Why did his parents give him up, why was it Rosebud that he chose to symbolize his lost childhood ect... These and many other things are left unanswered, forcing the viewer to make up their own mind, but then wondering what it all really meant. This is exactly what real life is like, and perfectly fit in with the comment
    "I don't think any word can explain a man's life."
    that a character makes about the investigation.
    A masterpiece. :!:

  2. #2
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    I love this movie, a very well crafted tale. Good storytelling.
    "A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." / Carl Sagan

  3. #3
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    Not exactly a review:

    Citizen Kane is an interesting movie. It's never my favourite, probably cos I have to study it in class. More likely cos I'm kinda shallow and already desensitised by numerous parodies, homages and rip-offs of its ground-breaking cinematic techniques at that time when I finally saw it in class. (To be honest I've never heard of it until Cinema Studies!)

    It's frustrating cos you never really know what Rosebud stands for (and my tutor won't give it away - figuring it out's part of the assessment.) Then again the film is a fragment of Kane's life, never intended to provide the whole picture. (I don't think any movie can depict an event or a life as a whole picture anyway).

    Like many other great films, it's the kind of movies that grows on you: If you do like it, you'll like it more the more you see it. But it's also like a hard-to-digest book. Say on a scale of 'difficult-to-digest movies', 1 being movies like Judge Dredd or Die Another Day and 10 being Tarkovsky's Solaris and Carl Dreyer's movies, I'll put Kane in 7.

    And that's my two-cents worth.

    "The idea was to be a symbol. editman could be anybody, that was the point."

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  4. #4
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    I have always enjoyed Citizen Kane, although I would never list it as one of my all-time favorites. Still, I have a professional softspot for any movie that focuses on journalists. It is always fun to see people in my chosen profession depicted as major characters on the big screen.
    Corfy
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