Review: "Mank" is a Distracting Messy Homage

Scene from Mank

No matter who you are, there's a good chance somebody at least once has told you that Citizen Kane is one of the greatest movies ever made. The mythology surrounding it has only ballooned in the near 80 years since its release, finding director Orson Welles being considered a filmmaking pioneer who took down Hearst with this swift commentary of greed and corruption. While history has been favorable, there are those like director David Fincher who want to posit that Welles wasn't the mastermind behind this story. There was one man in particular named Herman J. Mankiewicz - a studio savant who navigated the studio system in the 1930s before making this screenplay that changed the world. 

It's a juicy enough hook for Fincher to apply his familiar hostile view of humanity to. After all, who doesn't love an underdog story, where history can be rewritten to immortalize the real heroes? The issue with Mank isn't so much what it intends to achieve, but that it does so in a bit of a clumsy way. Based on a screenplay written by his father Jack Fincher, it's a story that glamorizes early Hollywood with endless references and pastiches that help to explore the "movie magic" concept. However, there's little else going on here that feels essential. For a story about writing a universally acclaimed hit, it sure lacks the payoff that could make this into a modern masterpiece. It's a bit of a misfire, finding Fincher giving too much into sentimentalism that clouds his technique, keeping the story from ever meeting its full potential.

The First "Mank" Trailer Reshapes the Narrative Around "Citizen Kane"

Scene from Mank (2020)

If you ask anyone to rattle off a list of the best movies ever made, there is a good chance that Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane will be on that list. For reasons that I don't need to get into, it has been praised and reassessed for almost 80 years, finding new audiences appreciating the craft that goes into telling a compelling story about a tycoon. Even if there's plenty of great stories behind its making, one has to ask if there's anything worth making an entire movie out of. 

Apparently on that list is David Fincher, making his cinematic return for the first time since Gone Girl. With one of the few major Fall releases still on the docket, Mank looks to be a period piece that captures the dark drama in full detail, making you understand the pain and sacrifice that goes into making cinema. It's a story of the screenwriter, Herman L. Mankiewicz, and his battle to get recognition for his script. While this sounds like Oscar-bait on its surface, Fincher's increasingly proficient, technologically-groundbreaking works don't take these stories lightly. One has to wonder what drew him to this story. If nothing else, the first official trailer looks to promise one of the most visually astounding works of 2020, if not the Citizen Kane (some pun intended) of recent Hollywood biopics. 

Failed Oscar Campaigns: "The Social Network" (2010)

Scene from The Social Network

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

Composing Greatness: #1.The Freshman Class of the 2010's - "The Social Network" (2010)

Scene from The Social Network

Welcome to Composing Greatness: a column dedicated to exploring the work of film composers. This will specifically focus on the films that earned them Oscar nominations while exploring what makes it so special. This will be broken down into a look at the overall style, interesting moments within the composition, and what made the score worth nominating in the first place. This will also include various subcategories where I will rank the themes of each film along with any time that the composer actually wins. This is a column meant to explore a side of film that doesn't get enough credit while hopefully introducing audiences to an enriched view of more prolific composers' work. This will only cover scores/songs that are compiled in an easily accessible format (so no extended scores will be considered). Join me every Sunday as I cover these talents that if you don't know by name, you recognize by sound.

Failed Oscar Campaigns: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008)

Scene from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

Failed Oscar Campaigns: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2011)

Scene from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

Theory Thursday: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2011) is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' Best Score

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) promotional material

Welcome to a weekly column called Theory Thursdays, which will be released every Thursday and discuss my "controversial opinion" related to something relative to the week of release. Sometimes it will be birthdays while others is current events or a new film release. Whatever the case may be, this is a personal defense for why I disagree with the general opinion and hope to convince you of the same. While I don't expect you to be on my side, I do hope for a rational argument. After all, film is a subjective medium and this is merely just a theory that can be proven either way. 

The Runner-Ups: Andrew Garfield in "The Social Network" (2010)

Andrew Garfield in The Social Network

Every Oscar season, there are a handful of actors who get tagged with the "snubbed" moniker. While it is always unfortunate to see our favorites not honored with at very least a nomination, there's another trend that goes largely unnoticed: those who never even got that far. The Runner-Ups is a column meant to honor the greats in cinema who put in phenomenal work without getting the credit that they deserved from The Academy. Join me every Saturday as I honor those who never received any love. This list will hopefully come to cover both the acting community, and the many crew members who put the production together.

Birthday Take: Trent Reznor in "The Social Network" (2010)

Scene from The Social Network

Welcome to The Birthday Take, a column dedicated to celebrating Oscar nominees and winners' birthdays by paying tribute to the work that got them noticed. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive retrospective, but more of a highlight of one nominated work that makes them noteworthy. The column will run whenever there is a birthday and will hopefully give a dense exploration of the finest performances and techniques applied to film. So please join me as we blow out the candles and dig into the delicious substance.

Birthday Take: Rosamund Pike in "Gone Girl" (2014)

Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl

Welcome to The Birthday Take, a column dedicated to celebrating Oscar nominees and winners' birthdays by paying tribute to the work that got them noticed. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive retrospective, but more of a highlight of one nominated work that makes them noteworthy. The column will run whenever there is a birthday and will hopefully give a dense exploration of the finest performances and techniques applied to film. So please join me as we blow out the candles and dig into the delicious substance.

20 Years Later, Fincher's "Se7en" is Still a Sick, Sad Masterpiece

Scene from Se7en

There was a time when the name of director David Fincher didn't mean much to people. While he had done various jobs in the 80's on franchise films for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, his only real claim to fame was shooting music videos and disturbing anti-smoking ads. In what is now a reverse career trajectory, Fincher made his cinematic debut with the conflicted Alien 3 - of which he disowned, and vowed never to make another movie. Thankfully for us, he came back a few years later and changed the crime drama with one of the most astounding, shocking, and smart stories of the 90's. 20 years later, Fincher continues to shock with films like Gone Girl, but it is his sophomore film that proved once and for all that he was an aggressive, voyeuristic force to be reckoned with.

Theory Thursday: "The Usual Suspects" is Overrated

Kevin Spacey

Welcome to a weekly column called Theory Thursdays, which will be released every Thursday and discuss my "controversial opinion" related to something relative to the week of release. Sometimes it will be birthdays while others is current events or a new film release. Whatever the case may be, this is a personal defense for why I disagree with the general opinion and hope to convince you of the same. While I don't expect you to be on my side, I do hope for a rational argument. After all, film is a subjective medium and this is merely just a theory that can be proven either way. 

Birthday Take: David Fincher in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008)

Scene from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Welcome to The Birthday Take, a column dedicated to celebrating Oscar nominees and winners' birthdays by paying tribute to the work that got them noticed. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive retrospective, but more of a highlight of one nominated work that makes them noteworthy. The column will run whenever there is a birthday and will hopefully give a dense exploration of the finest performances and techniques applied to film. So please join me as we blow out the candles and dig into the delicious substance.

A Comparison Between "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" Films (2009 and 2011)

Left to right: Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig

As the years have dragged on and the culture continues to find new fads, it is interesting to note the legacy of author Siteg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." While the book itself is a behemoth - accumulating 15 million copies sold worldwide - there are two camps on the two main filmed versions and the heroines that are at the center. With American star Rooney Mara claiming that the sequel is pretty much not happening and David Lagercrantz writing the first book since the author's death in 2004 called "The Girl in the Spider's Web," it seems as opportune of a time as ever to look back on the two filmed versions and see how the language and visual outlines play into each other.

A Look at Why "Gone Girl" Might Not Be a Best Picture Contender

Director David Fincher's latest film Gone Girl has been garnering a lot of attention both for its actual quality and for the performance of Rosamund Pike as "Amazing Amy" Dunne. It is a film that manages to explore some very pressing matters involving media, morality and marriage. In fact, it is one of the year's best films and is one of the best subversive hat tricks in cinema of 2014 with the second act twists creating an unpredictable role reversal for the movie. However, despite its great execution and rather solid work overall, I have a theory that things aren't meant for Gone Girl in the Best Picture race. As blasphemous as it sounds, it is actually very keeping in both Fincher's and the Academy's reputation towards his films.

Review: "Gone Girl" is Fincher's Excellently Twisted Take on Morality and Media

Director David Fincher may be the greatest filmmaker of the contemporary American mainstream crime drama. From Se7en to Zodiac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he has added a violent joy to tragedy. It is voyeuristic and, as he progressed, more artistic. He is a filmmaker of uncompromising talent by turning crime scenes into allegorical theories on human existence. In the case of Gone Girl, he explores the sick fascination with mental illness and essentially lying to the camera. It is a film that seems straightforward at first, but by the closing credits, the unnerving sense of happiness only makes things creepier. What Fincher has done was created probably his most twisted, unexpected, pulpy film to date, and it works more often than not.

The Directors Project: #10 - David Fincher

Scene from Cinema Paradiso

With the many lists and essays written on the subject of film, there has been one thing that The Oscar Buzz has tried to understand: Who is my favorite of the film world? For 10 weeks this summer, I will be exploring this with a countdown of the Top 50 names based on a numerical ranking of ratings from various sources, the following is a list of directors who rank above everyone else. With occasional upsets, this is intended as both a discussion opener as well as a better understanding of me as a film critic and fan. Please enjoy and leave any comments you have regarding the entry's selection.

Fincher Returns to Oscar Prospects with the Compelling "Gone Girl" Trailer

Ben Affleck

It may only be April, but that doesn't mean that we can't look forward to what the Fall season will provide. With an exceptional time in films right now with Noah, Joe and Under the Skin currently giving plenty to talk about, it would seem like the Oscar race has some early threats. However, for those that take last year's marginal selection as a sign of fate, then we haven't even begun. With all of this said, director David Fincher manages to hit the scene early with the first official trailer for his latest film Gone Girl, which opens in October. The results are immediately striking in true Fincher form and poses the question of what's really going to happen next.