The people downstairs called the police when I wouldn't stopbeating my television with a baseball bat at the conclusion of what most people consider to be the greatest film of all time. I went into a maniacal rage when, after sitting there for two hours, Orson Welles had the gall to reveal the mysterious Rosebud as none other than a sled. A f@#$ing sled!

What exactly was stopping Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) from doing all the damn sledding his heart desired? For God's sake, he could have bought himself a mountain and slid down it until his ass was as slick as a Teflon-coated frying pan. But no, we've got to sit through Kane and his ego trips as a newspaper magnate only to discover that the poor guy regrets missing his childhood. Oh boo hoo.

Since Orson was a young man when "Citizen Kane" was made, it takes some pretty heavy makeup to make him look like Kane at twenty and then Kane at eighty or whenever it is that he drops that stupid glass ball. Let's just say the makeup job is less than convincing. Orson gets fatter, loses some hair and ends up resembling Yul Brynner after he's had an allergic reaction to being stung by the world's largest bee.

By the time Kane croaks in cinematic real-time, we've been subjected to a lot of conceit and some really bad opera singing, courtesy of Kane's second wife, who has a voice like a bad car starter. In the fiftieth anniversary version that I watched, a subsequent documentary informed me that somebody was once offered $800,000 to destroy the negative of "Citizen Kane" -- as if this were a bad thing.