Steineded How sad is this?

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

rooprect "RKO 281" is an HBO film about the controversy surrounding young Orson Welles' first, and, according to the American Film Institute, greatest work, "Citizen Kane". While it's not necessary to see Kane first, I'll warn you there's a quick line of dialogue near the end where Mankowitz (John Malkovich) spoils the big Kane secret, the meaning of "rosebud" in the film, so it's probably best to see Kane beforehand.Human beings fall into one of 4 categories:(1) those who hate "Citizen Kane"(2) those who aren't familiar with "Citizen Kane"(3) those who have casually seen it once or twice(4) those who have seen it so many times that instead of singing in the shower they find themselves quoting: "Sing Sing! Do you hear me Gettys?! SING SINGGGG!!!"Shamefully, I fall into a category (4). But I have experienced all the others (1),(2) & (3) at different times in my life."RKO 281" is puzzling because I'm not sure which of the 4 categories, if any, it's aimed at. I think it tries to reach all which is an impossibility. It starts with some visual inside jokes for the cat (4) folks. For example: near the beginning there's a brief scene transition which starts on 2 stage hands sitting high up on the rafters as the camera pans down to the stage (a wink at the opera debut scene in "Citizen Kane"). So I began thinking, cool! RKO 281 is for nerds like me!But then it suddenly shifts into a very superficial setup, where for 10-15 minutes Orson Welles and his pal Mankowitz are trying to come up with a subject for the upcoming film. This is geared at the cat (1) folks who don't know what Citizen Kane is about. The problem is it becomes a little tedious for the (2), (3) & (4)'s in the audience who are waiting to get to the "sexual blackmail", "back room dealings" and other thrills promised on the DVD box.The rest of the film progresses in the same way, interspersing a few inside jokes while staying mostly superficial for the sake of the unfamiliar folks. The result, while not being a bad film, is a film that seems inconsistent in tone. Is it holding our hand and leading us through a tour guide's version of Citizen Kane? Or is it pricking us with subtleties, expecting us to read between the lines. I believe, for the most part, it's the guided tour. And I didn't learn anything new except for the hint at anti-Semitism coming from William Randolph Hearst and the reaction from Jewish Hollywood moguls. Nnow, that was interesting, but it didn't seem to tell us the whole story. In fact, all the thrills promised on the DVD box turn out to be a bit of a letdown. The "sexual blackmail" zooms by so fast you'd miss it if you blinked.Still, what would have been a mediocre to sub-par production is uplifted by some tremendous acting. Melanie Griffith brings a fresh degree of humanity to this otherwise cold story about old millionaires. James Cromwell is perfect as Hearst, the cold old millionaire. John Malkovich, playing Welles' drunk sidekick Mankowitz, is always fun to watch. But for my money Liev Schrieber really knocks it out of the park as Orson Welles. He doesn't look much like Welles, but that voice! There are a few moments where you could close your eyes and you'd swear they're dubbing the real one-of-a-kind baritone of the great Orson Welles himself. And that's what kept me watching from start to finish."RKO 281" is not essential viewing. But if you are curious about the phenomenon of "Citizen Kane", then you should definitely see it. Of far more value, however, are the 2 audio commentaries on the Citizen Kane DVD where film critic Roger Ebert & Welles' friend Peter Bogdonovich illuminate the film in a tremendously enlightening way that will not only enhance your enjoyment of Kane, it will make you see cinema in a whole new way.

Bill Slocum The myth of "Citizen Kane" outruns the reality in this snazzy, highly fictionalized presentation of the origination of, and subsequent fallout from, Orson Welles' cinematic triumph.When we first see young Orson, he is lighting his own birthday candle, at a party consisting of himself and his bedridden mother. "You were made for the light," she tells him. Becoming a young man, Welles (Liev Schreiber) lands in Hollywood with a film contract and a reputation as a "boy genius" with no film to his credit. Orson casts about for a film to launch him properly, and finds it at the mansion of the crusty plutocratic publisher William Randolph Hearst (James Cromwell) and his mistress Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith).Welles played fast and loose with the truth in his lifetime. So does "RKO 281." In "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," director John Ford famously had a scene where the facts of a case are disregarded so a newspaper can "print the legend." Welles was a student of Ford's, as "RKO 281" reminds us, and we get similarly legendary moments here presented as life.Welles and Hearst clash memorably in a couple of chance meetings. Hollywood executives are threatened by Hearst into trying to buy "Citizen Kane" in order to destroy it unseen. The mysterious death of Thomas Ince is revealed to be a murder showing the extent of Hearst's dangerousness and pull.All of this is at best speculation and more likely hyperbole of the kind that Welles himself trafficked. "RKO 281" thus obscures the real historic record, but director Benjamin Ross and writer John Logan do so with a verve that makes it work. "Take my hand, Menk," we hear Welles tell screenwriter Joseph Menkiewicz (John Malkovich), just after pushing the guy into a pool. "We'll make history!"Schreiber doesn't look or sound much like Welles, but he has the right presence for the role and I enjoyed his performance. Nobody really convinces, yet everyone does well with their off-center parts, especially Griffith. She has the toughest role, playing Davies in the same brassy way Dorothy Comingore portrayed her counterpart Susan Alexander in "Citizen Kane" but as a completely different person than Susan Alexander was, someone who is sincerely devoted to her rich lover. Also ironic is Cromwell, effectively nasty yet more sympathetic as a foil than Welles is as protagonist. In a film celebrating Welles' genius, it's notable the uptight Hearst gets the better of Welles in their exchanges."Men like Hearst don't love," Welles sneers, blind to the fact its Hearst's love for Davies rather than his pride in his wealth and fame that fuels the old man's rage against his picture.I enjoyed the way "RKO 281" plays with your rooting interest and sends up the old-Hollywood style of Welles' day. It doesn't feel real, but it entertains, and at 90 minutes doesn't waste your time about it. That's the kind of Hollywood production everyone can enjoy.

Boba_Fett1138 This is more of a shot docudrama with big name actors in it, rather than a movie that tells a real story. To me this movie was lacking a bit of a point and it didn't achieved much with its story or characters. It's a quite distant movie in which everything remains on the surface. Questions such as who was Orson Welles, why was he such a genius and how "Citizen Kane" influenced basically all later cinema are hardly being answered or handled at all. As a matter of fact this movie isn't even really about Orson Welles or the shooting of "Citizen Kane" at all. It's more about the battle of getting the movie made and eventually released.The movie does have some interesting things in it, that explain how "Citizen Kane" got first thought off, what the influences were and how it caused lots of troubles for the persons and studios involved but it does this in such an observe documentary kind of way that you just never feel involved with the story or any of its characters. The movie just doesn't always flow well and it doesn't always know to keep its main focus on the right things.Of course the movie is not horrible, for a made for TV-production it's simply still a quite good one, with some good production values and a great cast involved.Unfortunately it's not a really well cast movie. Sure it has big names n it but big names aren't everything. Was Liev Schreiber really the best pick to play Orson Welles? I just don't think so. I like Liev as an actor but more as a supporting actor. Some actors just aren't suitable to play important main leads. He of course also looks very little like Orson Welles. The movie also has further more James Cromwell, John Malkovich, Fiona Shaw and Melanie Griffith but it's perhaps only Roy Scheider who knows to make an great and lasting impression with his role.Worth a go if you're already a bit familiar with Orson Welles and the movie "Citizen Kane", otherwise this movie will hardly keep your interest throughout with its superficial, more documentary-like, telling of the story6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

tostinati Hate to say this, though I do, I think audiences have at last become too sophisticated for docudramas and film biographies of people who lived since the very late 19th and early 20th century, which we might term The Recorded Age. This is so very largely because a plethora of documentaries that are rich feasts of real visual source material and oral history appear every single day on cable TV. It is hard to watch anyone impersonating a figure who has been extensively recorded. I could buy Paul Muni as Louis Pasteur or Emile Zola. But I didn't buy Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman or Will Smith as Muhammad Ali. The technical aspects of impersonation are too much in the fore front of my mind as I watch, because I know too intimately, almost second nature, what the subject's style and physical presence are like. This will more often than not prove to be the case. Who can impersonate Lucille Ball or Clark Gable or Orson Welles once you have been media-saturated by the real thing? Or put another way, in this age, when we learn every facial tic and pattern of breath of really big personalities, how could an impersonator HOPE to make the original subject of a docudrama or film bio come fully to life? Because of the omnipresence of modern media, I think they are doomed to fail.Where RKO 281 succeeds --dramatically, at least, if not in terms of history-- is in giving us portraits of people who, famous though they are, have not been over-recorded, and exist more as legend or enigmas, as part of an oral tradition, than as flesh and blood people. John Malkovich's Herman Mankiewicz works beautifully because we have seen a couple of photos of the man, and have heard a lot ABOUT him, without actually having heard the man himself. Malkovich gets behind this character to a rare degree. Perhaps he identified with this three times burned out alcoholic ghost in the Hollywood machine who can walk the razor's edge because he has nothing to look forward to, and nothing to lose. And James Cromwell's playing of Hearst feels like a revelation. His Hearst is not a voluble man. In fact, he is reticent, almost withdrawn. He takes care of business, but his personality is dry and interiorized in the extreme, and he is slow to rise to comment about anything. Whether these people were really this way is another question. But while the drama is on the screen, you buy it. These roles work. (Melanie Griffith's Marion Davies is a woman child/simpleton. I still don't know what to make of that interpretation.) Liev Schreiber is serviceable, as they used to say, as Orson Welles. But truthfully, his portrayal is more than 'okay' only if you are in an especially easy frame of mind coming to the film.Early in RKO 281 there is a mock newsreel of Welles' arrival in Hollywood of the sort that opened Citizen Kane. The contrast between the care used in recreating a newsreel in the original film, and the amateurish sloppiness of this one is telling. We are good at using computers to create fantasy worlds of mythic cartoon figures. You'd think we would be able to do unprecedented things --like dead-on copying the style of a 60 year old newsreel-- if we gave it even half a try. For whatever reason (budget?) this just doesn't seem to be the case. I have seen as convincing mock-ups of old broadcasts or news film in a throw-away sketch on Saturday Night Live. I overlooked Schreiber's bizarre failed period hair that screamed out FAKE! in this mock newsreel. But, as I say, only because I wanted to watch the film. I had to start cutting it some slack in the first couple of minutes. Bad sign.