David Fincher's "Mank" | Netflix | Starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried | 12/04

PortCityProphet

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Yo this joint is beautiful as hell. A gorgeous black and white flick.

But I cut that shyt off 10 mins in cause I dont know what tf going on.
I guess I gotta read the wiki for Citizen Kane to even know what the basis of the movie about:heh:

But It looks great tho :whoo:
 

Piffiztheanswer

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It's alright you gotta be deep into the holllywood scene and politics of the 1930s to really get the references and jokes. Kind of like once upon a time in hollywood. But it's only worth watching 1 time imho.
 

DrDealgood

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This is awesome. Cinematography (of course - so good I almost wish Fincher would work in B&W more often), cast, script. I know it's niche for most people but it's the perfect companion film for CITIZEN KANE (which is on HBOMAX right now) and is also deep into issues that resonate today on the political and media tip. It does help to know some old Hollywood lore but I think worth the effort.

Give Fincher a good script and he's nearly unbeatable. :wow:
 

pete clemenza

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I see it just dropped so I'm in.. I love the new kid on the block HBOMax but Netflix still is unrivaled from top to bottom as far as streaming services go. These dudes just don't stop with the content.
 

PoorAndDangerous

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I definitely suggest being familiar with citizen kane/orson wells before watching. I had to take a break for work stuff about 30 minutes in but I really enjoyed what I saw so far.
 

FlyRy

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Barely #10 on netflix :picard: its pretty boring so far
 
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pete clemenza

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Watched about 35 min last night and right off the bat I can tell this won't be everybody's cup tea. I'm a fan of Citizen Kane so I get the dialog and plot but for those that haven't seen CK don't even bother. Its really high brow and snooty. Should've done another season of Mindhunter instead:unimpressed:
 

FlyRy

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Mank? More like Dank! I have no idea what happened to David Fincher but this is a new addition in his career section of films that aren't worth revisiting ever again. I mean 'Holy fukking shyt!' @ how fukking flat this film is. If it wasn't for Oldman and in particular Seyfried giving career-best performances this would probably be dryer than a piece of drywall in a desert.

Let's just start with how ugly the film looks. Fincher was trying to recreate the feel of an old film and for what it's worth, as far as the sound goes they nailed it (not the music btw, but more on that later). When it comes to the image though, what the fukk did they do? For some idiotic reason Fincher really thought it was a good idea to shoot this on 8K digital and then digitally degrade it. It ends up looking like they put a shytty instagram filter all over the goddamn picture with some digitally added cue marks. I know Fincher has a hard-on for shooting digital but he totally fukked up here. It's not that the cinematography is bad (even with the shameless copying of an 80 year old film by a filmmaker who Fincher pretty much shyts on here), it is just that the picture quality ends up looking even more washed than Fincher himself.

Back to the sound, the voices and sound of the film like I said really hit the mark, it's almost impressive considering how poorly they did the image. But then there's the soundtrack by Reznor and Ross and those two did a whole lot of fukking up on their own. They basically recreated an old 30s Hollywood soundtrack with traditional instruments but most of the time its heavy presence is laid over scenes of fast dialogues and quick wit to induce the sense of the rampant chaos of Hollywood filmmaking. It becomes obnoxiously present to the point the music even becomes distracting in a bunch of scenes.

Oh yeah, you thought this was a film about the writing of Citizen Kane? Yeah, you're sorta correct I guess but it also spends half its running time being a political film commenting on how characters like Hearst and Louis B Mayer basically introduced political attack ads and Fox News levels of voter manipulation through media. At some point it's such a big part of the film that it doesn't even feel like it's about Mankiewicz writing Kane anymore (even though Kane was based on Hearst) but more a story about David Fincher becoming the world's most unsubtle political commentator in film. Does that sound like fun? I can assure you, it sure as hell isn't.

In the midst of the drab there's also a constant insistence to be witty and clever but half the time the dialogues feel entirely too reliant on who's delivering them. That's where Oldman and Seyfried come in because they carry the shyt out of this long ordeal. Seyfried really is the star here, where Oldman has all the material to act as theatrically as he can (and does) Seyfried is forced to perform a lot more emotion with less words and she really pulls off a masterclass. She is the only element in this film that truly wowed me considering that Seyfried's entire career is summed up by the dvd budget section of a Walmart.

But hold on TheGodling, you write all that shyt above but you haven't even touched on Orson Welles yet even though you're his biggest stan on this board. What's up with that? Thanks for asking reader, because Fincher fukked that up too. I already spoiled it a little bit but Fincher really seems to have a strange dislike for Welles (again, ironic since he jacks his entire directing style for the film). For almost the entire duration of the film Welles is barely seen, mostly a voice on a telephone where he is presented in all of the mysterious aura that actually fits his legacy. Then when he actually makes his entrance we're confronted with an incredibly weak acting effort by Tom Burke in a small scene that does zero justice to Welles' character or his influence and part in making Kane (so little justice in fact that Deadline put out an article setting the record straight on Welles' true role in writing the screenplay even before this film came out). So yeah, after the entire grandiose mess of a film that it already was, that was the straw that broke Jigga's back.

Anyone pretending Fincher still got it after dropping yet another dud like this can kick rocks, you don't mean shyt to me.:camby:
:russ:
 

TheGodling

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Watched about 35 min last night and right off the bat I can tell this won't be everybody's cup tea. I'm a fan of Citizen Kane so I get the dialog and plot but for those that haven't seen CK don't even bother. Its really high brow and snooty. Should've done another season of Mindhunter instead:unimpressed:
And this is made all the way funnier (or sad really) by the fact its portrayal of the writing process of Citizen Kane isn't even close to the truth. Deadline wrote a great (but long) article on it before this film's release. To pick out the most important bits:

This comes from scholar Robert L. Carringer, who, in the Winter 1978 edition of the journal Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 2, published the study “The Scripts of Citizen Kane.” This provided a comprehensive analysis of all the extant drafts of the Kane screenplay, based on “a virtually complete set of script records for Citizen Kane” preserved in the RKO archives. Two Carringer books grew out of this, The Making of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction.

Carringer’s bottom line is that “Welles’ contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive.”


‘Mank’ Rekindles Classic Debate: Who Wrote Oscar-Winning ‘Citizen Kane’ Script? – Deadline
 

PortCityProphet

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Watched about 35 min last night and right off the bat I can tell this won't be everybody's cup tea. I'm a fan of Citizen Kane so I get the dialog and plot but for those that haven't seen CK don't even bother. Its really high brow and snooty. Should've done another season of Mindhunter instead:unimpressed:

Man I tried to watch CK last night so I could understand this movie but CK was boring af and couldn't hold my attention:dead:

I think they really fukked up making this shyt :heh:
 

Jean toomer

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I like some of finchers work but couldn’t even get through 30 minutes. Dull and fatuous. Clearly an ode to his father who wrote the screenplay.
I might try it again after a handful of gummies.
 
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