No better way to celebrate our hundredth post then to speak about the AFI 100, best movie ever made, it is also the best movie ever by Rogert Ebert Criterias, by the Village Voice Sight and sound poll, by french, russian, romanian polls, everybody loves this movie, and when you watch it you will know why the picked it probably.
Charles Foster kane (Orson Welles) press mogul, and billionaire dies alone in his own version of a Mogul's mega palace, his last words being a mysterious word, and some journalists making a documentary about him realize it is really important to find out more about him, so they interview his friends, assistants, colleagues, wives, butlers in order to get to know him more, from the early days of the idealisitc young newspaper owner he was, to the days of his inflated ego, thirst of power, and estranged freiends, through the great depression of 1929, and successes and failures in politics, love and being true to oneself.
VH1 has this kind of shows of discutable quality called the "rise and fall of ....." in the majority of time it's about a celebrity who has nothing to say, and another version of this is "the life and times of ......", biographies sell millions because of this whole fascination we have about the rich and famous, the successful and the powerful, the charismatic and the self-destructive, and this movie is about another fascination we have, the moguls and the filthy rich, especially media moguls like Spielberg, or Rupert Murdoch, or even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, because this concentration of opinion shaping power in the hands (and mind) of one man who has probably as many successes as failures and who can suffer from something as basic as a tooth ache.
This movie is ground breaking visually too, because of it's wonderful use of lights and shadows, especially on the face of CFK, and also casts some wonderful camera angles and matte paintings, the makeup to age the cast is credible even by today's standards, and the cinematographic narrative devices like time compression are amazing, we tend to forget what a brilliant man Orson Welles was, to the point of making a movie as poetic as the scent of honeyscuckle and as real as a punch in the gut.
It is also amazing how frail vanity is depicted in this movie, and how it burns to black smoke, and how simple important non corrupted things are the ones we find out are the most important, beyond the veil of money and looks, the dialogues are efficient and the characters well drawn, and the is even a "movie in the movie" in the form of a documentary, this movie is about power and corruption in the face of ephemerality, I had a serious thrill watching this movie, what i thought was a boring historic elitist movie turned out to be very contemporary, and when Mr Kane uses all his power to promote a talent-less singer, just because he wanted to , you realize that this "pygmalion effect" hasn't changed since and that's why telentless artists last for decades torturing the ones of us with taste more and more ( remember that Mariah Carrey married Sony Music CEO, and if that's not Citizen-Kane-ish !)
I don't know if it's the best film ever made, but it sure is a serious contender, and i couldn't help but notice that Orson Welles style in film making and acting was a huge influence on Coppolla and Brando thirty years later when they made "The Godfather", makes you realize that nothing is ever original, but if you steal, steal from the best, and what if i told you that Orson Welles was 25 when he wrote, directed, produced and starred in It, and that it was his first movie as a director, I always hesitate to use the word "genius" but it fits in here probably !
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