The first surprise was that David Fincher, Hollywood’s master-influencer of stylish, impeccably-designed thrillers, was making a movie about… the writing of a screenplay. A jarring match-up — even if the screenplay in question is Citizen Kane, and even if the debate over Kane’s authorship, in which Orson Welles’ contribution became subject to question, is storied and vibrant enough, its relationship to Hollywood history robust enough, to merit a movie. The pairing of director and subject seemed curious: a maybe-promising prospect with a potential dash of latent misfire.
The movie itself,...
The movie itself,...
- 11/12/2020
- by K. Austin Collins
- Rollingstone.com
When you watch a biographical movie about an artist, the drama of creativity — the writing of “In Cold Blood,” the invention of funk — tends to be front and center. But in “Mank,” David Fincher’s raptly intricate and enticing movie about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the fabled screenwriter of ’30s and ’40s Hollywood, and how he wrote the script for “Citizen Kane,” the act of creation is just one of many things that flow by. That’s part of what gives the movie its uniquely atmospheric, at times tumultuous tone of you-are-there authenticity. , and the effect is to lend it a dizzying time-machine splendor.
In the opening sequence, 1930s cars tool along a California country roadway, kicking up dust in a way that’s captured with supreme luster by Eric Messerschmidt’s exquisitely retro deep-focus black-and-white cinematography. The cars arrive at North Verde Ranch in Victorville, about 90 miles from Los Angeles,...
In the opening sequence, 1930s cars tool along a California country roadway, kicking up dust in a way that’s captured with supreme luster by Eric Messerschmidt’s exquisitely retro deep-focus black-and-white cinematography. The cars arrive at North Verde Ranch in Victorville, about 90 miles from Los Angeles,...
- 11/6/2020
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
The setting of David Fincher’s Mank largely resides in the confines of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s bedroom and its surrounding desert vistas. The man who is about to pen what many consider the bible for the greatest film ever made was sent there—banished, really—by Orson Welles in order to keep a low-profile from the Hollywood press, and to keep “Mank” out of boozy trouble. Thus his North Verde ranch is a location of moody interiors and desolate skies, and it’s framed by Fincher with the kind of reverence one might expect for an actual bible.
It’s not hard to guess why Fincher feels this way. This is the site, in Mank’s telling, of Citizen Kane’s genesis: the birthplace of a movie which has been declared twice by the American Film Institute to be the greatest film ever made, and which in 1941 was revolutionary.
It’s not hard to guess why Fincher feels this way. This is the site, in Mank’s telling, of Citizen Kane’s genesis: the birthplace of a movie which has been declared twice by the American Film Institute to be the greatest film ever made, and which in 1941 was revolutionary.
- 11/6/2020
- by David Crow
- Den of Geek
Part I.
In 1963, Film Quarterly published an essay entitled “Circles and Squares.” It addressed the French auteur theory, introduced to America by The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. Auteurism holds that a film’s primary creator is its director; Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” further distinguished auteurs as filmmakers with distinct, recurring styles. Challenging him was a California-based writer named Pauline Kael.
Kael attacked Sarris’s obsession with trivial links between filmmaker’s movies, whether repeated shots or thematic preoccupations. This led critics to overpraise directors’ lesser films, as when Jacques Rivette declared Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business a masterpiece. “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either,” Kael wrote.
She criticized auteurist preoccupation with Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, claiming critics “work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to mindless,...
In 1963, Film Quarterly published an essay entitled “Circles and Squares.” It addressed the French auteur theory, introduced to America by The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris. Auteurism holds that a film’s primary creator is its director; Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” further distinguished auteurs as filmmakers with distinct, recurring styles. Challenging him was a California-based writer named Pauline Kael.
Kael attacked Sarris’s obsession with trivial links between filmmaker’s movies, whether repeated shots or thematic preoccupations. This led critics to overpraise directors’ lesser films, as when Jacques Rivette declared Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business a masterpiece. “It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that you are incapable of judging either,” Kael wrote.
She criticized auteurist preoccupation with Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, claiming critics “work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to mindless,...
- 5/10/2015
- by Christopher Saunders
- SoundOnSight
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