Citizen Kane
1941
Review By: Michelle General
While watching the movie Citizen Kane, I was able to create my own opinions.
At the beginning of this movie I thought it was just going to be another boring black and white film that provoked no thought, that ties all of the lose ends before the movie is over, ending in yet another painfully happy ending. One that makes me wish that time would just move seconds faster. The movie did not interest me at all until the scene where Charles Kane dies and his last word is a loud, and very uncalled for "Rosebud". Other than that one word being so unexpected, when Charles Kane says this word, the camera shows a shot of only his mouth which is not something I expected, nor is it something that you see in a lot of movies.
I also thought that this movie had very good cinematic scenes.
For example, in the very beginning of the movie, when Charles Kane dies and the glass snow globe rolls out of his cold, dead fingers and onto the ground, cracking the globe and releasing the water onto the floor, the camera angle focuses on the broken hole in the globe. While looking at the globe, we see a house-keeper walk into the room. The interesting thing about this shot is that the camera angle allows the audience look through the glass, across the room and at the frightened house keeper. This makes the scene a lot more interesting because of the peculiar angle of the camera. One would not be able to see that angle without physically laying on the ground and aiming their view towards the doorway of the room.
Another portion of the movie that made me appreciate the cinematic scenes was later on in the movie when Charles and his wife are sitting at a dinner table, discussing his newspaper. What makes this scene so interesting is that the viewer can clearly see that the conversation topic stays the same, but the days are going by. You can tell that the days are changing because the only thing that is different about each scene is that their clothes surroundings are changing. I thought this was a really good way of showing Charles and his wife’s relationship- which was slowly falling apart.
I thought that the story was interesting and different than other stories that I’ve seen.
The fact that Charles was being taken out of his snowy cabin-like home and told he was going to live with a man that he did not know and eventually become a very wealthy man, is not something I had ever seen before. So from that scene on I began to be interested in how and why this boy was going to become a rich man.
While watching this movie, I found that some points were actually genuinely funny and made me laugh.
For example, when Charles was moving his office into an already occupied Mr. Carter’s office, some movers were moving things into the room like a rug, a desk or a picture.
While Kane and Mr. Carter stand in the doorway of their office and discuss how Kane is intruding (still in a somewhat polite way), Kane’s movers are walking into the office through the two, physically interrupting Kane and Mr. Carter. In this scene you can see Carter becoming more and more frustrated towards the movers constant interruption. This was pretty funny.
The only thing that I did not like about this movie was that sometimes the scenes where people were just talking about an issue were hard to want to pay attention to because they were pretty boring. This lead me to become confused about the storyline and sometimes I got lost.
Also when the movie had a flashback or a flash forward of something, the flashback /forward was pretty long and I would sometimes forget about the actual storyline.
Overall, I actually enjoyed this movie and recommended it to my family (although I doubt they will actually watch it). This movie kind of changed my point of views on black and white films from being that all films that look like this are boring and frankly a waste of time, to somewhat enjoyable and interesting to watch. I do not think that this movie is the best movie of all time, but I think that it was so good for its generation that it actually impressed me despite all of the full color action packed movies I’ve watched.
