Purely Joyful Movie!

best movie i've ever seen.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Both William Randolph Hearst and his nemesis, Orson Welles, wind up as tragic figures. This is a PBS presentation, an episode in "The American Experience," which in his later years Hearst would have abhorred.It's paid for by taxes, and Hearst is seen coming up with a very modernistic rant about Roosevelt and HIS tax program -- "impudent...and, yes, revolutionary." You can read the same uncrafted expressions of anger on today's newsboards, like Newsvine.Both men were ahead of their time. Hearst, beginning as a benign humanist, turns out to be Scrooge once he gets terribly rich. (His estate at San Simeon is half the size of Rhode Island.) Those baby boomers, once revolutionaries who tried levitating the Pentagon during the Vietnam years, now tearing their remaining hairs out over the national debt, must know exactly the trajectory of Hearst's evolution from iconoclast to skinflint.Welles doesn't fare much better. He's always lunging ahead, against the odds. Sometimes he wins -- that "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which was very good indeed. And sometimes he loses. In his later life he did nothing BUT lose.An obese Welles died at 69. Hearst lived well into his 80s. Rockefeller lived into his 90s. It may be true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The very rich are different from you and me." Fitzgerald died in his 40s in a modest Los Angeles apartment.

Battle Over Citizen Kane, The (The American Experience) (1996) *** (out of 4) Season eight of The American Experience featured this documentary about the making of Orson Welles Citizen Kane, which would cause the director to do battle with William Randolph Hearst, the man Kane is based on. There's one huge problem with this film and that's that the film takes way too much time to dig into the actual making of the movie. We spend about an hour getting to know both Welles and Hearst, which is fine but I think too much time is spent here. We learn how Hearst ended up making his fortune (as well as losing) and how Welles became an overnight sensation with The War of the Words radio show. The most interesting aspects happen when we get to the making of the film and how Welles was running out of time to get a movie on the screen as many felt he'd never film anything. When the actual battle starts between the two men it's rather shocking and perhaps sad that neither Welles or Hearst had the decency to try and meet with one another to settle this thing instead of letting it take both of them over. The even sadder thing is that the movie Citizen Kane ended up being a bio of Welles as he ended up just like the character. I've often wondered if Welles got lost in the Kane character or perhaps he was the Kane character and this documentary makes it seem like he was the Kane character.

This is a feature-length documentary found on the DVD of Citizen Kane(not to be confused with the actual TV picture of a few years later, RKO 281, in spite of the latter sharing the title and evidently at least some of the premise). It's well-produced throughout and leaves little to be desired. It is more about the life and accomplishments of Hearst than Welles, but that can be argued as fitting, as that was whom the film in question was intended to be a biography of(if it turned out to be a bit of a misunderstood attempt at so, masterful effort though it is, and in the end actually is closer to the real persona, past and then-future of its maker). We are given a lot of insight into both of them, who they were, what drove them, their triumphs and defeat. It's all told rather well, with clips of the movie itself(as well as others, where it fits), interviews, past as well as current, with those who worked with them(and even one of Orson himself, from '82), footage from behind the scenes, stills and narration. A number of the many shocks the two caused, including the (in)famous War of the Worlds broadcast, are detailed, with witness accounts where possible. It's well-written and put together with expertise. This alone ought to be a strong point in favor of owning a copy of the piece itself. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know about one and/or the other of the mighty people, the controversy and their clash. 8/10

The American Experience is an unusually intelligent TV show. The episode concerning the 1918 flu outbreak comes to mind as a typical, interesting piece. But here it presents the usual near-hagiography of Welles. And unsure of whether the story is dramatic enough, they exaggerate plenty, and find witnesses to do the same. They give nearly the whole narrative over to bombast, at one point calling Citizen Kane "the movie that ruined both Welles and Hearst." That's just um... hyperbole.It's at least the third time this material has been given the run-through after The Citizen Kane Book, RKO-187, and Citizen Kane itself, an dthat's not counting "The Cat's Meow" about William R Hearst. One smirks noting that there isn't much difference between this and the cheesy techniques in Kane's "News on the March" featurette.Thespian-witness Norman Lloyd who was flown out for 6 weeks of tennis on RKO's dime for a canceled Welles production, finds his own story fascinating; that is, when he's not overacting for the interview, delivering unremarkable memories that he finds remarkable, and obviously bullshitting to make himself seem more interesting.But nothing will prepare you for Sam Leve... no more annoying person has ever existed. He's a comically over-the-top stereotype, who resembles a bushy frog, and insists to viewers that the things actually happened in his now-unremarkable anecdotes. ("I was THERE. I'm NOT TELLING ANY STORIES!") He gesticulates. He shouts. He's impresses himself. He's a self-parody of everything bad in bio-pix; some utter jackass pulled out of mothballs, whose every word comes off as horseshit. This guy applauds himself for forming a sentence, and he's supposed to offer insight? He wears out his welcome in about ten seconds. Really folks.... give Uncle Morty his meds and put him back in the asylum. He's not helping your movie.But mostly the problems are those that afflict the "Behind the Music" series. Anything unique or extraordinary is crushed under the wheels of the unrelenting, typical bio-doc format.