Raising Kane

"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far." ~Jean Cocteau

What is the greatest movie ever? If you answered The Big Lebowski, you would be wrong. If you answered Magnolia I would have sex with you, but you would still be wrong. If you answered Casablanca, you would get a B+, and i would accuse you of being a kiss-ass. And if you answered Twilight: New Moon, I might just have to dropkick you in the fucking throat before ripping out your little glitter-infatuated heart and eat it. 

No, according to film historians, academes, scholars, and other smug dillweeds whose opinions I shouldn't give two shits about, but actually do is Citizen Kane. Some might even call it the Citizen Kane of all movies.  

Wait, that's redundant. 

The story revolves around the death of a newspaper tycoon, Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles. Upon his deathbed, his dying words were "rosebud," and the dirty rotten newspaper scoundrels go out and interview everyone who knew Kane to find some insight into who or what rosebud was. That's it--the plot of the Best Movie Ever. 

SPOILER ALERT

I could marvel at the technical perfections of CK. At the way the timeline jumps forward and backwards non-linearly, to make you constantly question what year you're really in. Imagine a Tarantino movie, except all the characters are rich, all the weapons are replaced with newspapers, and instead of talking about madonna songs (cuz, you know, she's still 40 years away), they talk about . . . NEWSPAPERS!

~"You gonna bark all day little doggy, or are you going to talk about our editorials on dog bites?"~

The cool part about this movie is the controversy behind its creation. See, Charles Foster Kane is really . . . drumroll please . . . William Randolph Hearst. Just the most important newspaper man to probably ever live in America. He invented yellow journalism, almost singlehandedly creating the fervor behind the Spanish-American War. Hearst went out of his way, spending millions to try to stop the production of this movie. He was able to smear Welles reputation, or exacerbate Welles own destructive habits, and able to have him almost blacklisted in Hollywood. Ironically though, Citizen Kane has survived the test of time, and Hearst's story has been deduced to a grumbling rich man-boy spending his whole life masturbating to the memory of his fucking sled.  And that my friends, is the GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL FUCKING TIME!

~"Where's my sled, Mama?"~