TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Gaylord McGee (gayinfolsom) This movie was OK.. I fell asleep during it so take my rating with a grain of salt. Its not a chick flick perse and thats what i was looking for. It has some really bad flow problems and saved an enormous amount of the story for the last 20 minutes. That to me, is a massive flaw and an unintentional mistake on the part of the writers or directors.

jadavix "Reds" is hopelessly overlong, but still a decent movie. The first half - all one hour and forty five minutes of it - is mostly just there to set up an unbelievable and uninteresting love story. Keaton is dowdy and unappealing and we get no sense of why Beatty's John Reed would have fallen for her.Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, perhaps, because he's also played as no great catch. He doesn't add much to the movie though, apart from the thrill of saying "there's Jack Nicholson!" while you're waiting for the first half of the movie to end. Gene Hackman is also in there, not adding a whole lot either.The movie really gets going in the second half, which saved it for me. Perhaps it was the fact that the love story is moved aside for political intrigue in Russia, and we get a sense of John Reed as a man swept up in the current of history, used for purposes aside from his intent and not really understanding his role. This is where the movie becomes gripping.Throughout the movie there are interjections from real people who presumably knew the real John Reed. These are generally more interesting than the movie itself and suggest a documentary approach would have been more fulfilling. At times the cuts from these scenes back to the action is jarring, which seems to detract from the dignity of the speaker, as though Beatty had to use all the footage of these speakers he had available to him, and had to stick it in somewhere, even if it didn't fit.Overall, the love story is too stagy for the weight of the material and should have been excised. It leaves you with a lot to wade through if you want to get to the interesting parts.

GeoPierpont Anyone who has actually read the book knows that this film addresses perhaps .01% of what transpired and captured in great detail of the Russian revolution. Decidedly the POV represents a NYC based Harvard educated journalist and requires bouquets of lilies and Steven banging ivories ragtime style...Agonizing three hours with too much time spent on Keatons 1981 frizz hairstyle, eye lined gazes and inconsequential interactions.... Why would Warren tackle such a propitious project culminating in weak story lines and limited perspectives... almost as if he lost confidence in this project, resorting to mainstream maneuvers to keep an audience entertained, complete failure, almost...Appreciate the attempt to cover such a grand momentous event, however the interviews of witnesses were not value added with no names, party affiliation, or title, they could be anyone and seemed such...Greatly admire Warren and Diane as actors, Maureen and Jack stole every scene and were underutilized... This film was a great disappointment, tried to watch a third time to verify these sentiments but could not get past another 10mins... sigh, had a lot of potential!

Marc Israel When experiencing or listening to a story, the most important thing to consider is the point of view of the teller. Reds starts off and interweaves interviews of those who had some contact with either or both Louise Bryant and Jack Reed and put their story into both big-picture context and social irrelevance. This is delightful. The film, outside of this tells us Jack Reeds impression of his experiences as a radical writer who finds himself turned into an idealistic politician with his self-engrossed sometimes wife trying to be important by his side. I found their relationship hard to watch as Beatty turned Louise Bryant into some unbalanced and immoral slut. This is not so delightful and failed as a love story that I would care about. What is the real glue of the experience are the interpersonal speeches laid out by Jack Nicholson as play write Eugene O'Neil and the political summaries presented by Jean Stapleton and Emma Goldberg that seem to cut to the core, almost the way science fiction movies need that smart speech of 2 minutes that moves everything along. The movie needed to move along further as the darkness of post-revolution Russia, cell-bound Norway and the political basements in America show us frustration and loneliness but tell us nothing of what the fight was all about.