The 100% Club on Rotten Tomatoes lost a member: Citizen Kane. After the recent unearthing of a negative 80-year-old Chicago Tribune review, the 1941 Orson Welles film lost its perfect rating on the review aggregation website, slipping all the way to 99 percent. I wrote about this news yesterday with the headline, “Citizen Kane Lost Its Perfect Score On Rotten Tomatoes, Making Paddington 2 The New Greatest Film Of All-Time.” This silly post proceeded to break Film Twitter. So let’s get a few things straight:
#1. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece.
#2. Paddington 2 is also a masterpiece.
#3. There are many movies in the 100% Club, including Modern Times, The Terminator, and Tokyo Story. I went with Paddington 2 because see: #2.
The Museum of the Moving Image gets it:
https://t.co/oS6bLxE8xN pic.twitter.com/e6djfmFAeI
— Museum of the Moving Image (@MovingImageNYC) April 27, 2021
The Hollywood Reporter even got in touch with Paddington and Paddington 2 writer and director Paul King, who was asked about The Godfather Part II of marmalade-loving talking bear movies toppling Citizen Kane.
“It’s extremely lovely to be on on any list, which includes Citizen Kane, but it is obviously quite an eccentric list that goes from Citizen Kane to Paddington 2, so I’ll try not to take it too seriously,” he said. “I won’t let it go too much to my head and immediately build my Xanadu. But I have been cooking up a model just in case.” King also joked that if Welles was still alive, he might have made something “nearly as good” as Paddington 2, “but he had [to] muster his meagre talent into merely knocking out Citizen Kane.”
As for Paddington 3, King isn’t directing the trilogy capper, but he did write the script, which is “well developed and coming on nicely. It’s tough to get right and we certainly don’t want to make a film just for the sake of making a film… Maybe this is where Orson went wrong – he just needed to have spent a little longer on the script!”
Congratulations to Paddington, a very good bear.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)