Citizen Kane, then...

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

Young dude gets old and crusty at a dinner table montage

You can do this with any film:
Vertigo -- Old nervous dude stalks blonde babe around San Francisco
Chinatown -- Detective dude gets bloodied up by short foreign dude
Persona -- Actress babe pulls silent treatment on chatty nurse

Retitle:Dude, Where's My Snowglobe?

Moby-Dick: Nut chases a big fish

[sic]

kinda enjoying this tbh.

am i the only one to have cried at the ending? such a pitiful man in the end..

I just watched this for the first time and it actually lived up to the hype fer me. this fucking film. love that it ends with the same shot it starts with, suggesting you could just play it on repeat. that fucking screeching white bird!! scarier than most horror movies released today. those shots of the opening newsroom! my god.

Yes to all that. Love that bird.

*lowkeytalkaboutthisandthatSCRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEECH!*

you know, it wasn't even a newsroom. it was the theater where they were projecting the newsreel. love how that also suggests that, in the film's chronology, kane is long dated at the time of his death - the world's moved on to talkies, papers don't dominate anymore.

I had to rewind the part with the bird to make sure my imagination wasn't fucking with me, that there wasn't a ghost in the machine.

I love the newsreel/theater scene so much because, by the time I saw it for the first time, I had been used to black and white films in my own admittedly limited experience as being constantly, perfectly staged in terms of dialogue -- everything was all about precision and delivering of lines. So the sudden cut and seeing and hearing a bunch of people all talk back and forth 'naturally,' however written and focused that part of the script was in turn, was a bit of a revelation. Everything actually felt relaxed.

What I love most about the film now is the young Orson Welles, without makeup and jowls, ready for the world.