Citizen Kane

ctually every bit as good as it supposed to be. To anyone who likes to think they're being edgy by calling it overrated or whatever, I know you're just saying it because you think it makes you cool and counter-cultural or whatever, so I probably can't change your mind whatever I say here, but one thing anyone should try is watching all the Academy Award nominees, or at least the Best Picture nominees, from the 14th Academy Awards, in sucession, perhaps one a day. Despite only winning one award, and famously losing out on Best Picture, this film makes all the others look embarrassingly dated. Even the ones that are also very good look like Roundhay Garden Scene compared to this. It truly is a revolution of a film. Welles could have gone exclusively into gore porn after this and he would still be a good candidate for the greatest talent in American cinema. This film has already been rightfully praised so much it's hard to find anything new to say about it, so mostly all I can do is heap on more praise to the pile, but this film deserves it. A few things are slightly less talked about from this film that I do wanna bring up though; 1. This is a lot funnier than people give it credit for. Welles himself called it a comedy, I believe, and honestly I can see that. There's some very witty dialogue. My favourite gag might be the "FRAUD AT POLLS" headline. 2. Weird how Welles' obvious self-deprecating joke about how he inserted the screeching cockatoo to wake up any audience members falling asleep has been taken out of context and treated as serious by so many people. It seems obvious to me that it was as a sort of bookend to his relationship with Susan, referring back to the shadow puppet scene where Kane makes a bird 3. The speech about the girl in the white dress is actually one of my favourite monologues in any film. The "frame story" actually has a lot of great moments that people often forget because they spend all their time praising the scenes with Kane in them (and fair enough, they are incredible). 4. Susan's bad singing is some impressive work. It's hard to sing purposefully poorly without falling into cartoonist shrieking, but actress Dorothy Comingore is very good at sound just bad enough to be believable. 6. I like how, unlike most films about "corrupt rich people", this doesn't moralise or turn its character into a Bond villain, but condemns what he represents far more strongly than if it did, because systemic critiques always hit harder than "rich people are mean :(", which is one of the most helpful to the status quo statements you can make, implying as it does that it would be fine if the ruling class could throw us a bone with a few more scraps of meat on it. 7. The opening and final shots might be the best one-two punch of those two things in... certainly a major release American film, if not any film ever. We begin with death, and end with youth. All sounds pretty simple when you say it out loud like this but as I say it's already been analysed in so much depth all I can say is either redundant or just feels like explaining why a funny joke is funny. 8. It's hard to review this without sounding silly. "Masterpiece" is hilariously understating it. Like, of course Citizen Kane is good. What do you want me to say?