After reading it for the first time, I naturally have a lot of doubts. I went to watch citizen kane, then read a little background material, and then watched movie reviews, listened to podcasts, and after a while, it made me more interested in this movie.
So I watched it again when I was free, and this time I thought I had more understanding of the background and could focus more on the lines and the movie itself. The lines are quite dense, and there is a sense of every word and every word has a role. The script felt solid, and many details I had to watch a second time to notice. Finch's director is indeed very precise. There are several scenes that can already be said to be classics, such as the scene where mank met Marion Davies and randolph hearst for the first time, and that mank took his younger brother to meet the MGM boss, A scene where they walk and talk on set. I still don't like the decision to deliberately imitate old black and white movies, I even think this movie would have no effect at all if it was shot in a normal way, and it would even look better, because black and white plus those gimmicky's tricks of imitating old movies actually hinder the audience from enjoying a lot The details also bring a certain sense of distance to the actors' such good performances. But if you understand his decision, he also did some interesting things, such as paying tribute to citizen kane's shooting technique. The music is also imitating that style, but it's pretty good, how can trent reznor/atticus ross be so talented.
This movie involves several topics. The first thing everyone saw was the dispute over the copyright of citizen kane's screenwriter, but after watching it, they found that it was only slightly involved, not what the movie wanted to discuss. You could say that part of it is a political satire borrowed from the past. Of course, it also depicts the inside story of Hollywood's golden age studios, not at all in the romantic color that is presented on the screen. And the struggles of the mank character. I think it's interesting to think of it just as a behind-the-scenes story about the origin of the script for the movie citizen kane. In short, this movie is not the kind of movie that you can watch once. I usually prefer to watch a movie to relax instead of doing my homework, but it is interesting to come to such a movie occasionally.
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