i got shot at on my drive home from watching mank and mank was still the worst part of my night

This gets so much better as it goes. It starts on such an odd note where it reads like you walked into the theatre an hour late. I think it’s just so frantic in that first act and the more it really starts to settle and invites you into what it’s trying to do, you come around to it. There’s a lot of good in here, but for someone like Fincher—a master at making the audience care about anything he throws at them—I was bored way more than I should have been.

Why the fuck is no one talking about the fact that Bill Nye the Science Guy played Upton Sinclair in this movie

basically this movie is Orson Welles trying to get Mankiewicz’s ownership share diluted down to .03%

They let him make a love letter to his dad and I think that’s wonderful.

good movie but give me Steve Kornacki busting out the Big Board and breaking down where all the different bits of Citizen Kane came from.

Every scene with Amanda Seyfried is the best scene

best picture marathon: film #3

“i couldn't have put it better myself, which may be why i write for the movies”

to put it plainly: my GOD this is boring. if i had been shown this movie without any prior knowledge, no way would i have been able to guess it was made by david fincher. i’m not necessarily saying that i dislike seeing a director step out of their comfort zone artistically, but when the end product of that step is this dull... well that’s another story. i can only recall a few sequences where i really felt captivated, or interested in the slightest, otherwise it always seems to fall short. i’m glad others are getting something out of this because while i don’t really dislike it i remain totally perplexed by it. this is simply ‘not my cup of tea’ (and what a bland cup of tea it is)

"Oh, Mank, are you ever serious?"
"Only about something funny."

An ice-bath sorta-satire concerning the intersection of art, commerce, and politics but made by this smirking misanthrope/moralist as openly contemptuous of people's intrinsic flaws as he is completely obsessed with them. Ahistoricity isn't the problem here, nor are the relentlessly affected period flourishes (some of which work and some of which super don't); the real thing is that all this bickering and backstabbing and competing ego and attempted mythmaking produced fucking CITIZEN KANE and its legacy, and Fincher characteristically thinks that's not only extremely ironic and funny but also incidental, and you can't do that and also ask me to be curious or to be moved. Also the really-makes-you-think timely political parallels are trite and whatever Oldman's doing, no sir, I don't like it.

if ur a cinephile watch this

if ur a Cinephile™️ skip to 49:51 for animated pterodactyl 

if ur not a cinephile and straight skip to the end

if ur not a cinephile and a fruit just skip to 43:18 for amanda seyfried saying “It blew my wig!”