I can't dispute much of what you stated above.
You are better off watching paint dry than seeing the 2002 remake.
I'm not going to speak for Josh and his 3.5 grade, but even though, I have some reservations about the film itself. I still think it's a great movie with some superb film-making techniques.
Frankly, I pay little attention to film grades in disc reviews, particularly, to those films I've seen beforehand.I agree.
I have to be honest and say that assigning a numerical value to a film is something I find very difficult to do. I always hope that more attention might be paid to the paragraph below the number than the number itself.
Ambersons was tricky for me to pick a number on the film itself. The overall package rating was much simpler - it’s a 5/5. The physical design of the packaging is beautiful. The selections of vintage bonus material are enlightening. (And Welles on the Dick Cavett show is as fun as you’d expect.) The newly created bonuses add a tremendous amount of context and wisdom. It’s one of their best special editions ever, I think. So that’s easy.
And there’s stuff in the movie I love. That prologue with the Welles narration, I could watch that as it’s own short any day of the week. There are some great performances. I love the cinematography. It’s a downbeat film but I’ve loved plenty of downers. It just feels uneven to me. The deletions rob the film of context and character, and it can make some of the stuff that does remain seeming out of place without that extra material.
That’s what becomes tough - is a movie that has 5/5 scenes truly a 5/5 if those scenes aren’t assembled correctly in relation to each other? The movie had infinite potential - but what’s there in the final cut falls short of that potential to me. So whether that’s 3.5 or 4 or 5... I think we’re all going to feel a little bit differently about how much that matters to us. It even varies with me from film to film. Some movies I admire and enjoy despite the fact that they missed the mark and maybe even because they tried so hard, and other times I can acknowledge the effort and not be as enthralled with the falling short part.
If Citizen Kane is a 5/5, Ambersons-as-it-is at 3.5 feels about right to me, inasmuch as a totally subjective, arbitrary numbering system can feel right.
I still think this disc is one of the must-get titles of 2018.
My first introduction to Orson Welles was as a teenager during the period where he seemed like an often accessible guest on television talk shows. I knew nothing of his history and hadn't seen a single one of his films at that time; and still, I found him to be captivating and intriguing. And then, in a catalogue of old radio shows I plucked out "War of the Worlds"; and from there I was off and running.
The first time I remember seeing Orson Welles was him doing one of those Paul Masson wine commercials.
It seemed Welles had Carte Blanche to appear on Merv Griffin's talk show. I would sometimes anticipate a certain guest only to have the "raconteur" show up for an entire show. I remember being disappointed one time when he appeared that the scheduled guest was bumped. Even though, he came across as arrogant and pompous I would watch transfixed as he told stories (sometimes with different endings etc than the first three times he had told the same story
).
