citizen kane review

Citizen Kane is a 1941 film by Orsen Welles which follows the life and death of the title character, Charles Foster Kane. I usually don’t enjoy older movies, but I had a great time watching Citizen Kane; I even found it to be pretty funny. The visual style of Citizen Kane is very striking to me, the harsh lighting and indirect shots. I like the character of Charles Kane, though I wouldn’t like him as a real person. He is very interesting, and he’s a very charming and charismatic person. I know that Citizen Kane is not at all a comedy, but a lot of the movie was actually really funny to me. Some of my favourite examples are the opening newsreel that we abruptly cut too after Kane’s death; a specific moment in the opening newsreel where Kane is “helping” with the cement blocks; “It will probably turn out to be a very simple thing” with a quick cut to the rest of the movie; being able to see and hear young Kane throughout the entire scene inside his childhood home; the montage of Thatcher reacting to the headlines and stories that Kane was putting in The Inquirer; “You’re too old to call me Mr. Thatcher, Charles.” “You’re too old to be called anything else.”; the entire scene of when Kane first takes over The Inquirer; “Charlie said if I didn’t [get to sing in the BLAH] he’d build me an opera house.” “That won’t be necessary” with a quick cut to the headline “KANE BUILDS OPERA HOUSE”; not traditionally funny, but I find the jump-scare cockatoo really funny; at the end when they’re packing up all of Kane’s stuff, there are two guys up on a higher level with a ladder, and they ask “Can we come down?” and when Mr. Thompson says yes, one of them says “OK, here we come,” and I’m not sure why, but I thought that was really funny; “That’s a lot of money to pay for a dame without a dome.” I think it’s cool that the character we follow – Mr. Thompson – isn't the focus of the film, we don’t even see his face directly, only through shadows and smoke.