The once-great film critic and flamboyantly blunt-spoken personality Rex Reed has left the earth at age 87.
In his prime (mid ’60s through early ’90s) the openly gay Reed was a swaggering, colorful, unintimidated writer. When he was younger he seemed to really know his stuff and truly care about the value of great cinema. Reed really and truly understood the Hollywood universe, and was a major fan of same. He worshipped legendary filmmakers and their best work, and said so repeatedly with commendable eloquence.
Reed wasn’t really a proverbial “critic of the cloth” who walked around in monk’s robes, and in this sense wasn’t on Roger Ebert‘s level (i.e., at times he seemed to value snooty judgments more than insight for insight’s sake) but during his peak years Reed was an absolute king of the bitchy-critic realm as well as a famous brand and an occasional movie actor, and I for one quite liked reading his stuff, or most of it. I adored his bluntness. Plus I knew him personally and enjoyed his company as far as it went. He was always friendly.
I’ll admit that the older, going-downhill, white-haired Reed got a little sloppy with his reviews from time to time (factual errors, misspellings, etc.), but I loved that he despised woke critics, and they him. I admired his courage in deriding Jordan Peele‘s Get Out (are you hearing this, Bob Strauss?), knowing full well that the identity fanatics would viciously trash him for this.
Here’s my Movieline assessment of Reed’s legendary Warren Beatty hit piece in Esquire, titled “Will The Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up?“:
