david fincher: imagine i dont release a movie for 6 years and then come back with a biopic that’s the sexy kind of boring and also in one scene amanda seyfried says “oh that hitler is creepers”

you guys: sounds underwhelming

you guys: what is the sexy kind of boring

me: everybody SHUT UP. what does amanda say next david

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.

Mank faces off against his greatest enemy yet — my attention span!!

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.

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

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

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

Martin Scorsese is somewhere out there in the world crying rn cause he got this piece of cinema before having to see black widow 😍

2020 Releases Ranked

Every scene with Amanda Seyfried is the best scene

"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.

I really needed 5 different characters to tell me that Citizen Kane is the best thing he’s ever written

I usually make it a policy not to rate/log anything before I finish it but.... I started this a while back, got a little more than halfway, and literally did not find one single thing that was intriguing in this story or the way it was made. I can’t compel myself to finish it, I am so uninterested.

I enjoyed this more than I expected to, and I credit the fact that I watched Citizen Kane for the first time immediately before starting this. With Kane fresh in my mind, I was able to pick up on the homages and parallels built in by Fincher Sr., which is probably this film’s greatest strength. I definitely felt it was overlong, with a lot of filler Hollywood ego stroking through the middle, but Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfriend are compelling enough to stick with it through that sag. The production design on this is lovely, so it’s almost a shame that it’s not in color — the digital black and white feels off kilter and detracts from the realism a bit.

Looks beautiful, but couldn’t follow half of it.

It took me two viewings to catch on to the organ grinder’s monkey parable because I’m a moron. But the second time around - outstanding. 

The walk and talk is also one of the best scenes from 2020.

The way my liberal education has given me the predisposition to fucking hate William Randolph Hearst is only rivaled by Charles Dance always being so good that I want to punch his face

Anyway, 2020 sucked and I understand why this fizzled

"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." - Sara

Getting one star only for Amanda Seyfried, who should've been the main focus of the movie. Otherwise? Boring as absolute hell.......

They don't make movies like this anymore.

Kudos to Netflix for allowing two very not mainstream films to be made in 2020, Kaufman's I'm Thinking Of Ending Things and now surprisingly David Fincher's Mank, a film that perhaps I warmed too because it's about screenwriting, but one I think is excellent, engaging and thought provoking nonetheless. The performances were also a true marvel.

Loved the music, was very iffy about the sound design and the little things Fincher did to make this seem aged. Came off as more of a gimmick than anything else. Seyfried was really good in this and Burke sounds a great deal like Welles but this was just decent for me. Like all Fincher films, I’m going to have to do a rewatch and see how I feel the second time but as of right now, it’s just decent when I was expecting more.

my cinema professor would be proud of me on how many references i understood, specially regarding the historical context the movie is set.

overall, this movie has everything the academy loves: its about citizen kane, directed by fincher, starring gary oldman (istg every movie i watch w him he looks like a completely different person), featuring a bunch of white people, with homages to classic hollywood thru the photography and montage.

the thing is, this movie has everything to be a movie id enjoy, i love the metalinguistic and the concept "a film about a film" thing, but, this wasn't it for me. I guess i wasn't interest on an alcoholic man and i couldn't connect w any of the other characters.

tho i screamed every time orson welles showed up, again, thank you professor marco for spending nearly a month teaching about citizen kane and orson welles