{"id":5405,"date":"2004-08-23T11:40:55","date_gmt":"2004-08-23T19:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/23\/5405\/"},"modified":"2004-08-23T11:40:55","modified_gmt":"2004-08-23T19:40:55","slug":"citizen-kane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/?p=5405","title":{"rendered":"Citizen Kane"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was watching an episode of The Sopranos<\/a> recently (not a new one, maybe from last season?) and Tony’s wife Carmella has gathered all her friends for their “movie night”- all these New Jersey overpriviledged (Mafia) housewives sit in their home theater and try to “appreciate film.” <\/p>\n

\nThey movie they pick to watch together is Citizen Kane<\/a>; they have picked it off the AFI Top 100 Movies List<\/a>. So, they watch it… the lights come up and they nod appreciatively. <\/p>\n

\nActually they didn’t get it, but feel like they should have.<\/p>\n

\nI think that’s really sad; I just feel sorry for them. <\/p>\n

\n They feel like they should be “appreciating” this classic movie, but have no idea why. They don’t know who Orson Welles<\/a> is, or perhaps more importantly, who William Randolph Hearst<\/a> was. They don’t know anything about the “language of film” that is used to create mood and tell a story outside the dialogue. They have just wasted one hour and fifty nine minutes of their lives.<\/p>\n

\nBut, Carm, it need not be this way! Citizen Kane actually is a very interesting movie- much more so if you know what you are looking at. Fortunately, many many people have come before you and written quite a bit of analysis of Citizen Kane and pretty much any other movie that has ever been shot.<\/p>\n

\n

One such article: Roger Ebert’s Viewer’s Guide to Citizen Kane<\/a>. In general Mr Ebert is not one of my favorites; I think he is very mainstream and makes a conscious effort to ignore movies not made by his evil corporate masters. Nevertheless, this article is a good start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was watching an episode of The Sopranos recently (not a new one, maybe from last season?) and Tony’s wife Carmella has gathered all her friends for their “movie night”- all these New Jersey overpriviledged (Mafia) housewives sit in their home theater and try to “appreciate film.” They movie they pick to watch together is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}