Citizen Kane, then...

halfway into the movie i was entertaining the seriously baked suggestion that welles' casting of heston as a hispanic guy was some profound commentary on the social construction of race.

xp to self

i can't wait for morbs' disquisition on baked welles

just watch citizen kane, it really is awesome, you will love it, the end.

Abbott, you are talking silly nonsense or something.

Have you guys seen other films w/ Welles around that time? He wasn't THAT fat -- had to have been padded for Quinlan. Even the "I Love Lucy" he did wa sfrom maybe the year before, I think, and he was not mega-corpulent, just jowly.

The Ambersons Welles made might have been better than Kane, but the one that survives? No way.

(I think I like The Lady from Shanghai and Othello better than either.)

abbott see them in this order:

1) kane (really entertaining; really, honest - there's a reason it's been parodied ad infinitum on the simpsons, and there's a reason pauline kael - much as i hate quoting her - called it "the most fun of any great movie ever")
2) f for fake (crazy fun, and gives a good sense of welles's sense of humor)
3) touch of evil (crazy, baroque)
4) chimes at midnight/falstaff (best movie ever)
5) macbeth (funniest shakespeare ever - othello is better objectively but i still prefer this one)

ambersons is wonderful but a very frustrating watch. it's still better than almost any movie ever even in its current form but maybe hold off on that til you see these.

this film has a lot more going on than most top-ten all-time classic snoozefests.

OTM, i think kane is a way deeper film than, say, the bicycle thief or potemkin or city lights or the seventh seal or the godfather, not to mention funner to watch (tho i like all those).

I saw CK for the first time just a few years ago, with all the attendant baggage, and it rocked me.

he was hot back then, Abbott.

OTM! the picture james naremore uses on the cover of "the magic world of orson welles" is quite fetching

JD's list is pretty solid except 1) falstaff/CoM is very hard to find (tho it rules), and 2) i'm not crazy about his othello

also, the third man, for some more great welles/joseph cotten fun, even tho it ain't a welles film as such

Why do I feel that

the bicycle thief or potemkin or city lights or the seventh seal or the godfather

weren't the "top-ten all-time classic snoozefests" enrique was referring to?

funny, that's exactly what i thought he had in mind.

Maybe Potemkin, but I figured he was talking about Bresson and Antonioni and Godard.

D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Soporific"

yeah it basically is, except 'the godfather'.

not bresson/antonioni/godard. well, maybe bresson -- but the pre-1960 canon. maybe early antonioni.

ie griffith, chaplin, stroheim, lubitsch, murnau, lang, pabst, eisenstein, pudovkin, dreyer, carne, rossellini, de sica, bergman, fellini.

'kane' was like the one american sound film permissible back then -- a couple of fords, maybe, but not the westerns, that kind of thing.

changed end of the 50s -- discovery of 'regle du jeu', french new wave, rediscovery of hollywood genre cinema, blah blah.

'ambersons' would be the best if done right, and it's still yoga flame as is, but the more you see it, the more the ending just betrays the whole thing, and i say that without being able to remember how it 'should' end.

I think I like The Lady from Shanghai

Madness! I saw it again recently and it gets my vote as his worst: mannered, coy.

the stranger's kinda weak i think, at the very least it's a waste of edward g. robinson in a boring part

Madness! I saw it again recently and it gets my vote as his worst: mannered, coy.

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, December 16, 2007 12:38 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

look who's talking!

ANyone seen this?

look who's talking!

Ouch!

Don't forget The Trial!

I wish I could forget the Jess Franco edit of the Don Quixote material though.

This film actually lives up to its reputation!

look who's talking!

-- s1ocki, Sunday, 16 December 2007 02:04 (7 hours ago) Link

Now!

Shanghai is, um, FUNNY.

http://movie.yesky.com/movie/cover/353/5853_001.jpg
Is is the animals that talk in this movie? Must rescreen this.

I saw <i>Journey Into Fear</i> the other night - 40s noir, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Wells, how could it be bad? But it was bad. Or at least pretty uncompelling.

Wells = Welles

you didn't like Welles' fez?

Welles was a pretty silly caricature in the movie, even by the standards of the times I think... For a noirish movie, there was something fundamentally wrong with the plot, there just wasn't any tension.

don't think much of his shakepeares (except 'chimes') or noirs (except 'touch of evil').

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7161/youneedamorticianmx4.jpg

YOU NEED A MORTICIAN! YOU NEED A MORTICIAN!

I love how great Welles looks as an old man, and how he nails how old people move and think -- their habit of sharing curdled witticisms and phony insights -- without condescension. The newsreel section, for example, where a young reporter interviews Kane after he returns from speaking to "the great powers of Europe."

Malpertuis

I read his credit as "Orson Welles (cassava)"

youtube of worst thing welles ever did

You sure about that?

Well that video didn't last for long.

Well, you all know how it goes, crumb crisp coating, IN July, I'll go down on you &c.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qg4i22x9M

is bogdanovich's commentary on the 2-disc edition worth hearing?

no iirc

I thought it was pretty silly.

That's staring you in the face when you open up this thread--it's way, way up at the top (Sept. 28, 2001--within three weeks of 9/11). I got into a big back-and-forth on Kane once with a friend; can't remember if he said exactly the same, but he was dismissive in any event. I can see where someone would come away from a first viewing thinking it's slightly overrated--I don't think so, but with so much advance build-up, such a reaction seems more than reasonable--but it's hard for me to understand not thinking it's pretty great anyway. Even if you don't think it's profound (I do), I would still think you'd love the humour, the performances, and/or the whirlwind technique. I saw an interview a few years ago with Graham Yost (the guy who wrote Speed), and he recalled the time in high school when his dad, Elwy Yost (long-time host of a classic-movie show in Toronto), wrote a letter explaining that his son would be absent tomorrow because he wanted him to stay up and watch a midnight airing of Citizen Kane. I generally cringe when people well up on camera, but that time it seemed very spontaneous and genuine.

I still haven't gone back to finish this, and I'm not usually put off by hype about the 'classics'. Just feel no compunction to go through with the rest of it on what I've seen so far (Young dude gets old and crusty at a dinner table montage)

rolling my damn eyes

don't bother Black IP's

yeah am aware of that reaction, but i felt it was important my voice was unstifled by your entrenched luvviness

don't bother Black IP's

I've seen every episode. Power to the people!

Okay so

https://www.criterion.com/films/32250-citizen-kane

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and three Blu-rays with the film and special features
Three audio commentaries: from 2021 featuring Orson Welles scholars James Naremore and Jonathan Rosenbaum; from 2002 featuring filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich; and from 2002 featuring film critic Roger Ebert
The Complete “Citizen Kane,” (1991), a rarely seen feature-length BBC documentary
New interviews with critic Farran Smith Nehme and film scholar Racquel J. Gates
New video essay by Orson Welles scholar Robert Carringer
New program on the film’s special effects by film scholars and effects experts Craig Barron and Ben Burtt
Interviews from 1990 with editor Robert Wise; actor Ruth Warrick; optical-effects designer Linwood Dunn; Bogdanovich; filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Henry Jaglom, Martin Ritt, and Frank Marshall; and cinematographers Allen Daviau, Gary Graver, and Vilmos Zsigmond
New documentary featuring archival interviews with Welles
Interviews with actor Joseph Cotten from 1966 and 1975
The Hearts of Age, a brief silent film made by Welles as a student in 1934
Television programs from 1979 and 1988 featuring appearances by Welles and Mercury Theatre producer John Houseman
Program featuring a 1996 interview with actor William Alland on his collaborations with Welles
Selection of The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio plays featuring many of the actors from Citizen Kane
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: Deluxe packaging, including a book with an essay by film critic Bilge Ebiri

And yet still we wait for the colourized version!

WHEN WILL TED TURNER'S DREAM BE REAL

From beyond the grave: "What is it you WANT? In the depths of your ignorance?"

will we see a colorized version at last

I think the dream is now a 3D version.