Review by Abranth-d

Here's my review of Mank. So Mank is the new straight to Netflix movie directed by David Fincher from a script written by his late father Jack Fincher . The movie is a biopic about the late Herman J Mankiewicz who is best known for writing the movie , Citizen Kane , which is considered one of the greatest movies ever made. Herman or " Mank " as he's referred to in the movie is played masterfully by Gary Oldman who's performance is aided to from the cinematography of the movie being all film strip esque and 1930s ish and will no doubt be a serious contender at the Oscars. Amanda Seyfried was also great in this movie. Despite the top notch production and great talent though , I felt this movie was boring and I'm someone who actually enjoys arthouse movies. Now the story is set in 1930s Hollywood where Herman is in isolation writing the script for citizen kane for Orson Welles aided by someone to dictate to and a german nurse . Then there are flashbacks to before his isolation where he meets producers , Gambles , drinks and all Hollywood - ish stuff. But its very hard to keep up with the characters cause you don't know anything about them other than that they are either studio heads , politicians or both . And since you're not familiar with any of them , it just doesn't work . If you've seen the popular HBO show Entourage or even the netflix show Bojack Horseman , you know how great shows set in Hollywood are . There's agents , writers , directors , scandals , crisis management , PR teams and so much more things there to set up drama , and the one other thing common to both shows is how they use current politicians , current actors with cameos , pop culture references and a whole lot of stuff we could relate to . This movie is pretty much Entourage in the 30s without an Entourage for Mank . Mank meets people , has smart stuff to say , brokers deals with production houses and that's just about it. Mostly it has to do with the fact like I said before that we dont know this world , in Entourage someone says " James Cameron's directing Aquaman " and we didn't need the show telling us who he was and in Bojack Horseman when someone says " this movie is going to cannes " we didn't need the show explaining what it was , cause we just know things from pop culture. This movie on the other hand needed to tell us that for us to know the world , what's at stake and who the characters are , instead it just doesn't and I think Jack Fincher didn't feel the need to do that since he wrote this script at a time when 30s pop culture was common knowledge , atleast among film critics. Now David Fincher is one of my favorite directors working today and I'm a huge fan of his movies for the different themes in them and how perfectly crafted the movies look and are acted . Speaking of themes , Fight club was about anti consumerism , Gone girl was about pretending to be someone else and all that . Now this movie doesn't really have a theme , or maybe it does and I didn't notice said theme , which only means its subtle. Now David Fincher has made few masterclass movies in his long career as a director and that's cause he's worked with different writers such as Gyllian Flynn , Steve Zailian , Andrew Kevin Walker and Aaron Sorkin , despite working with different writers , he's made his movies with his own vision in mind and you'd distinctly know each one of them as his own movie , but his father I don't think is someone who Fincher would collaborate with if he was not his father , cause I wouldn't have guessed this movie to be directed by him had I not known about it previously . In the end , Mank definitely doesn't look like something Fincher would've made unless he was paying homage to his late father , nevertheless the movie doesn't dissapoint you completely cause of its great acting and quality of production .