Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 22, 2005 | | Summary | Excellent | Content
 | This is Warren Beatty's masterpiece. In Reds, director-actor Beatty creates for himself in John Reed a positive role--a man who is way ahead of his time, not just politically but personally. Maureen Stapleton as anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman was equally heartwarming. I wish there were more films like this and congratulate Mr. Beatty for this courageous and remarkable film. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 19, 2005 | | Summary | Epic in detail, epic in scope | Content
| Warren Beatty gives a staggering performance, not only in a difficult lead role but as producer, director and screenwriter, after this film Beatty seemed to rest on his laurels, with a few brief exceptions. Diane Keaton is also strong, although I think basically miscast. She is many things but not a femme fatale on the Louise Bryant line, and the picture fails to show why Reed and Eugene O'Neill (not to mention her first husband!) were all so hot for her. Nicholson is ok as Eugene O'Neill, really a rather underwritten part. He seems to be playing O'Neill as though O'Neill was a sailor character from THE LAST DETAIL, endlessly skulking over the waterfront. Stephen Sondheim's glorious, somewhat sardonic anthem shows why this Broadway composer should be writing more for the movies.
It's hard to believe this film came out back in 1981. When it opened, it seemed as though it might usher in an era of intelligent historical epics about the American experience. History has taught us otherwise. Yes, the "American experience" for even though the movie is much concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution, and much of the film is set in Russia, it is largely concerned with how Americans took the news of a revolution on the other side of the world.
What would we want from the DVD version of REDS? That's a question with an easy answer. And it would be the best extra of the year. Simply present the unedited testimony of the so-called "Witnesses" of the film. The best part of the movie was seeing, in plain black and white, and so elegantly photographed, actual men and women who were alive before WWI and who (mostly) remembered Bryant and Reed or other Village intellectuals. In REDS their appearances are sometimes frustrating curtailed, in order, of course, to serve the dramatic arc of the movie as a whole. I'd love to see the enedited footage. These "witnesses" include many who are gone now--indeed I wonder if any of them could still be alive, for the youngest of them was about 80 when the film was shot! And some of them were geniuses in their own right--Henry Miller, Rebecca West, Will Durant, Scott Nearing, as well as some of the most endearing personalities of the century. I'm crossing my fingers that Paramount is working this up. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 28, 2005 | | Summary | An Incredible Masterpiece! | Content
| This is one of the best films that I have ever seen. It shows you how much we owe to the people of the past who gave their hearts, souls and lives to help create a level of peace, freedom and prosperity for all of us. I hope this film will inspire us to follow this tradition.
I will have to heartily disagree with Albert Lee. Although he is helpful in the sense that whatever he rates a film you can be sure the exact opposite is true. As you can see he has given this film only one star. High praise indeed.
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| Rating | | | Date | April 18, 2005 | | Summary | Here are people who did something. | Content
| A particularly antagonized review cuts this film off, tauting it as liberal pro-Communist romance, full of lies and Hollywood evil. The review concludes that films like Reds don't get made anymore. To that remark I agree, though my attitude towards Reds, Hollywood, Beatty and film making of this stature is completely different than said review.
This is an amazing film. Epic in nature and intimate in quality, it beautifully weaves togather the World War I era in America, Socialist political machinations, so-called Leftist radicals (and their views, anger and work), friendship infused with national urgency and a dynamic love story of distinct personalities coping with their place in history and each other.
Praise was granted Beatty, in the form of an Academy Award, Directors Guild, and Golden Globe for Best Director, but this is a film which ought to be regarded with greater esteem.
Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Maureen Stapleton give incredible performances. Beatty, the lead as John Reed, journalist and activist, revolutionary and lover is also quite funny and thoughtful. Keaton, as Reed's love, Louise Bryant is fiesty, angry, empassioned, and sublime as she witnesses and fights for John, searches him out and brings calm to a chaotic life. Nicholson as playwright Eugene O'Neill is awesome. With the beauty of doing so very little, he is scathing, vicious, heart broken and poetic. Nicholson is in command here like never before. Rather than the working class characters he played in The Last Detail, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, or The Postman Always Rings Twice, he is an intellectual, a poet and artist, a captain of words and emotion, beset by the pain and horror O'Neill put on stage.
But the performances are one aspect of this film. Vittorio Storaro's (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky)cinematography is stunning, capturing darkened smokey meeting halls and low ceilinged cabins, expansive Russian palaces, the streets of New York City, deserts of the Middle east, and snowy Russian tundras.
As well, this film deals with the touchy, and for the time (1980-1981) very dangerous issue of Communist Russia, Socialism in America, Capitatistic rule, American unionization and the significant struggles therein.
For people to drop a film like this in the bin of Left Wing Propaganda is trite and ignorant. Surely Beatty's politics were in play here, but there is a far deeper and interesting story to be told. While the revolution in 1917 in Russia marked the 20th Century, this tale of a man and woman's becoming, his expression and fight for ideas, the difficult fight for equality or political regard, the challenge of maintaining a private relationship while working for a different world, and the scope of humanity's need to better ourselves by challenging dominant paradigms and establishments, this is an important and successful film.
It hopefully will be available on DVD, and would be wise to include supplementalinformation which surrounds the circumstances and history of this story.
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| Rating | | | Date | April 01, 2005 | | Summary | An epic of evil | Content
| This movie is a good wake-up call for regular americans. It
shows them what liberals like Warren Beatty are really all
about. This is a giant love-letter to communism from Beatty
and liberal hollywood.
The Russian revolution was among the most evil events in history.
It represented the total overthrow of western civilization in
a whole country in favor of an anti-life monsterous criminal
enterprise. Millions died and hundreds of millions were made
into slaves. There is nothing romantic or noble about it.
The film also completely fails to show the reality of WWI-era
communist hotbeds like Greenwich Village. Moral degenerates
who dreamed every night of destroying America are made up to
look like a bunch of heroes. The depraved and sick natures of
their lives is never shown.
Reed was part of a generation of American liberals who declared
open war on their own country. He helped organize and promote
criminal gangs in america which attacked businesses. He turned
his back on america and freedom by refusing to support the
war of the free world against germany.
The end of Reed's life is full of lies as well. Lenin sent him
back to the US after the war to bring revolution to the streets
of America. But it didn't work. Even in the criminal so-called
labor unions there were enough real Americans left to recognize
the evils of communism and throw it out.
Revealed as a spy, Reed fled back "home" to Moscow and his Red
masters. There are conflicting stories about his end, but the
one in this film is false. Some reports suggest that he died
as a result of his unhealty lifestyle. Others suggest that he
was murdered by his communist masters for having failed to bring
the revolution into america. Even his death was used for
communist propoganda. Much like sanctions on Iraq, the
communist dictator Lenin claimed that sanctions were denying
people medicines and that reed had died of lack of medicine.
The only good thing I can say about this film is that nobody
makes things like this anymore. Reagan's defeat of communism
showed almost everyone but the hardcore liberals that communism
was a bad deal. Of course that doesn't mean the liberals have
given up. It just means that Liberals like Beatty have turned
as they did in the 1940s and 1950s to a more subtile form
of covert anti-american propoganda.
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