Reviews & Previews - Citizen Kane Can Suck It

Posted on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at 06:00 PM

Citizen Kane Can Suck It

By: S. Tran

Even though I write reviews of movies I don't really consider myself a movie critic. I don't have that Quentin Tarantino encyclopedia of movie knowledge in my head. I have no idea who played the the lead Ewok in The Empire Strikes Back or how Showgirls ever got made. What I do know is what I like and what I don't like and on top of the list of things I don't like are old black and white movies.

The American Film Institute lists Citizen Kane as the best movie of all time. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the members of the AFI don't watch a lot of movies because Citizen Kane sucks. I've tried watching that movie at least 10 times and I've never made it past the 15 minute mark due to how much it sucks.

It's not just Citizen Kane though, its pretty much every old black and white movie I've tried to watch. There are a few reasons for this.

If you need any more proof just check out the way people kiss in those movies. Seriously, I can't believe for a second that anyone in the history of kissing ever kissed like that in real life. They basically just press their lips together, separate, turn their heads and do the same thing again.

Now apparently this was called awesome acting back in the day. Today you can find more convincing performances in an Ashton Kutcher movie. Ok, you can't. But in most other movies today you're going to find better acting. People in dramatic movies today actually act the way people in life might act. In those old movies there was no connection between how people acted and real life.

1. The acting is horrible. Plain and simple. Those old movies are full of nothing but a bunch of overacting hacks. It's not their fault, it was just the style of acting back then. The kind of acting that requires a woman to dramatically smack her forehead with the back of her hand while swooning whenever something tragic happens to her.

2. The special effects were not so special. It's just too distracting trying to watch a movie when they are supposed to be driving in a car and the background makes it look like they just hit 20 pedestrians. For some reason no one ever told the actors that you also don't drive a car by randomly jerking the wheel back and forth.

I also have to wonder why no one in those movies ever bothered to raise their guns above their waists to shoot. Every time there is a shootout it involves two guys shooting their guns from the hip while jabbing the guns like a knife. Then if one of them gets shot we get more bad acting, see number one above. I don't know, maybe guns back then were really heavy or something or maybe people trained to shoot like that. If that's the case I have to believe that not a lot of people got shot in real life back then.

3. Life was too boring back then, at least according to the movies. Morals were different, social values were different. Things were conservative and that affected what you could show on TV and in the movies. This sanitized version of life just doesn't ring true when I'm watching the movie. It's not just the era though. There are great modern movies that take place in the 40's and 50's.

Those movies from the 40's and 50's only showed you life though the lense of the censors. Men and women were expected to act and dress a certain way. There was little variety and when you throw in the bad acting you get a lot of caricatures.

I have no problem with people who enjoy those old movies. Everyone has different tastes, but please don't tell me that they are some of the best movies of all time. Also, what kind of kid names their sled Rosebud?