Review of Citizen Kane (1941) by John B — 19 Oct 2012

This movie was absurdly boring. It is listed by many as the greatest movie of all time, and if that were truly so, cinema would not even find a market in illegal piracy.

The language of the film is fantastic, as would be expected of a book, but in a film the characters are left aloof and distant, and you can watch the entire film without caring in the slightest about "Mr. Kane". Or any character, in fact, although the humanity of his second wife creates this effect, though to the limited extent that you simply feel sorry for her, and wish nothing in the movie happened to her, not that any of her performances contained much entertainment value whatsoever.

The big point of many review is the non-linear storyline. If that were such a great achievement, I suppose the Koran would be hailed as a literary masterpiece, yet unlike this movie, any serious researcher in honest moments can only scoff at it.

As with the phrase uttered by "Mr. Kane" on his deathbed, rosebud, this film hardly has a point; as a cinematic biography, it is lacking in the substance that any such film would require, as a soap-opera, it is simply impossible to feel bad for Mr. Kane's demise, as it is to feel elation at either his achieving wealth, or loosing it, and certainly leaves little in the way of drama and suspense, as a political film or one regarding the news industry, there are simply no ideas brought up that haven't been thought of already, and, at best, you can experience disgust at Mr. Kane's intellectual dishonesty, the high point in regards to entertainment for the film. As any other type of film, especially a romance film, which would require "Mr. Kane" to act like something other than a robot, and his relationships to be more than shallow and uninteresting flings that had little to no apparent humanity in any exchanges between "Mr. Kane" and his wives, this was a failure, and it is no surprise that film critics would hail this as genius and futilely explain in great words how something of no apparent artistic value is the ground-breaking messiah of creativity, as many a modern art critic has earned a living doing so for squares, triangles, other geometric shapes, or chaotic scribbles and random glued on cigarette butts and general junk, and in doing so, provide the only entertainment or beauty related to the thing at hand, although flowery words will never replace true art, which Citizen Kane is not.

The one attempt to create a sort of mystery for investigative reporting, the word rosebud, will simply leave you hoping for him to find it, so as to provide some sort of action or surprising event, which is ultimately irritating by the end of the movie, as we discover there is nothing to it, we are not left with a profound sense of a new mystery to discover, or even anger over this fact at the film maker for not revealing it to us, we simply are left with the feeling that rosbud and this film are pointless, and boring and slightly fustrating to endure and understand, not that there was anything of substance there to do so with.

1/5 for ending.