Did they change the name of The Bicycle Thief to Bicycle Thieves? Or am I remembering wrong?

The Italian title (Ladri di biciclette) was always plural. Only fairly recently have more people been insisting on the proper English translation. You still see it both ways all over the place.

Did they change the name of The Bicycle Thief to Bicycle Thieves? Or am I remembering wrong?

The Italian title (Ladri di biciclette) was always plural.

The plural title is nicely ambiguous, so I'm glad they're trying to change it back.

I'm going to have to rewatch Vertigo, aren't I? It is probably my least favourite Hitchcock from that period, but I think I was about 18 when I saw it, and I can imagine it is one of those movies which improves as you age.

I hate Citizen Kane. I saw it as a teenager, and I can't even tell you why I hated it, except I thought it was boring.

I have always found Citizen Kane emotionally rather cold. But - and it's a big but - as a piece of filmmaking it really is out of this world. It's the sort of film where there's something new to notice every time you watch it. But a lot of its innovations have become standard since it was made, so it helps to have a bit of a sense of film history to be able to appreciate them fully, I think.

(Citizen Kane is the only individual film I take the time to look at at length in my classes. When we start, most of the students can't understand why it was long counted as the best. When we finish, all of them can).

I remember feeling very skeptical about Citizen Kane because it's impossible to watch it without the sense that you are watching THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE BY ANYONE EVER AND YOU WILL APPRECIATE THIS GREAT PIECE OF ART OF ELSE, but I was blown away in spite of myself. It really is that good.

What struck me about Citizen Kane was how much fun it was to watch the first time I saw it. There are very painful, near-tragic moments, but there are also some extremely funny ones (true for almost every Welles film, quite honestly).

That said, I prefer Touch of Evil, despite the lack of there ever being a truly definitive version of it.

I'm going to have to rewatch Vertigo, aren't I? It is probably my least favourite Hitchcock from that period, but I think I was about 18 when I saw it, and I can imagine it is one of those movies which improves as you age.

I was a huge Hitchcock fan when very young and really didn't like Vertigo. It still wouldn't be my favorite, but best and favorite are very different for me. It has definitely risen in my esteem. Of course, since moving to San Francisco it has risen to a whole new level.

I've always loved Kane. Whether that's the cause or effect of my obsession with Hearst Castle, I couldn't say.

I guess I really was destined to live in California.

Yeah, I didn't fully appreciate Vertigo when I first saw it as a teenager. Now as an adult, I am blown away. From the direction, to the cinematography, it is really a great film.

I thought more highly of Citizen Kane after listening to Ebert's commentary. Holy fuck that's some great commentary. When I saw it without the commentary, I thought it was a good movie, but seemed overpraised. I still think it is one of those "everyone thinks its great so it must be", but I can definitely see why people like it.

What I remember most about Citizen Kane was the big deal my film teacher made about the scenes where you can see the ceilings of the rooms. Putting ceilings on sets was a big deal back then.

Interesting blog post on the list.

It's a long-established fact that Frankenbuddha and I share a brain WRT Kane and Touch of Evil, so I'll mostly point up to what he said and say, "What he said."

But also, what Jessica said. I still, every time, approach Kane like it's a spinach movie, because it's just so crusted over with cultural expectations of Serious and Important and Vital For Your Cinematic Education... and then it swoops in and leaves me breathless. It's like some boy everyone you know has been nagging you to meet because he's handsome and employed and dresses well and is nice to his mother, and by the time you actually meet him you've mostly written him off because no actual person can be that unfailingly great; he's got to be either terminally boring or a serial killer. But then when you do meet him, he's neither; he's just actually seriously that much of a catch, and more. If anything, all the people who practically turned you off from him forever underplayed the totality of his multilayered awesomeness.

Except, sadly, that boy never really exists as a boy. Fortunately, he does as a movie, and that movie is Citizen Kane. It's a catch, a keeper, the one you bring home to meet the parents and then grow old with.

But Touch of Evil is still the movie that throws pennies at your window at two in the morning, and you sneak down the trellis and duck down an alleyway so it can do dirty, dirty things to you, and you're almost ashamed of how good it feels.

I less-than-three JZ's spicy brains.