Not the greatest film I have ever seen

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2002)

What the. are you telling me that this is the best film ever made? Go ahead and call me dumb, but I think if you transmit `Citizen Kane' to outer space and declare this is the best film ever made in human history, there will be an alien invasion very soon.
I do not intend to dismiss this film, for it deserves to be called a classic. It was made in 1941, and the fact that it hasn't aged much since proves its power. But is a film that revolutionized the way people make movies necessarily the greatest movie ever made? Yes, you may say. I am not going to argue with you, but my answer is a firm negative.
`Citizen Kane' assembled almost all the advanced filmmaking techniques of its era and added a few more of its own. There is the shot where we see the objects through their reflections on a glass globe. Later, the camera travels through a signboard, pans down on a building's glass ceiling and then the people below. Transitions are also handled cleverly with the use of diffusions, which replace part of the current frame with part of the next. If you are not impressed by all these, that's just because there are fancier stuff in the cinema today, and you don't appreciate the fact that many of them actually originate from what we see here.
The story is told in retrospective by the friends of our protagonist after his death. He is Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), a rich guy who has all the money he can spend but whose self-indulgence finally makes him lose all his fortunes, friends and wives (yes, it's plural). Does this sound familiar to you? Forgive me for my ignorance if `Citizen Kane' turns out to be the film that spawned this kind of crap in the first place, but I would have expected something more intelligent and less stereotypical in what has been hailed as the best of the best. Mean rich guys do not die alone in their villas, more often than not, they get all they want and have hot jungle sex with models every night.
Fashionable techniques aside, I find little interest in this film, and I feel sorry for all those other great movies that frequent places #2-10 on critics' top ten list, for `Citizen Kane' looks pretty sad when compared with them.
My Rating: ***/*****