Bruce Reid, Author at Parallax View

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Dream of Light

Written by Bruce Reid October 12, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

In 1973, the Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice announced himself as a major director with one of the great debuts in cinema, Spirit of the Beehive, a stunningly assured and poetic evocation of the fantasy of childhood, as well as a beautiful salute to James Whale’s Frankenstein. It took a decade for Erice’s second film, El Sur, to arrive; and his third, Dream of Light, didn’t come along until 1992. (To add to the frustration, Dream of Light languished for eight years without achieving distribution in the U.S., despite rapturous reports from every festival it played.) What qualities of patience, methodical self-confidence, and even-tempered humility must one possess to release only three films in as many decades without growing bitter or cynical about moviemaking? Precisely the same required to make a riveting, engrossing film about a man trying to paint a quince tree in his back yard.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Holy Smoke!

Written by Bruce Reid October 2, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

Recklessness, combined with a passionate, headstrong commitment to see things through to the end, can be deliriously exciting to brush up against, or it can be ruthlessly self-absorbed. No filmmaker balances between these poles, and is more daringly reckless, than Jane Campion. Her characters are often so wrapped up in their own certainties, they barely communicate with the outside world. (Campion’s most famous heroine is a mute, after all.) But her films are a constant stream of glorious, thought-provoking images, racing from one to the next without waiting for the audience to catch up.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid

2000 Eyes: The Ninth Gate

Written by Bruce Reid September 29, 2020September 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

Johnny Depp, seedier and more aged than he’s ever played before, stars as a dealer in antique books. When one of his wealthier clients wants him to track down the three remaining copies of a book that, legend has it, was co-written by Lucifer, he has every reason to be suspicious (not the least being that the client is played by Frank Langella). But the paycheck is large enough to overcome his concerns, so Depp flies off to Europe, and the body count starts to rise.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Madadayo

Written by Bruce Reid September 23, 2020September 22, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

We (and by we I mean all of us, not just those people) succumb so easily to the extremes when contemplating our demise: apocalypse or enfeebled withering. A bang or a whimper were the only options Eliot gave for the world’s end; burn out or fade away, as rock and roll fans rewrote the line. In truth, however, most of us do not die in either flames or impenetrable shadow. We stumble along, perhaps weaker, and needing a cane for support, but also hopefully wiser and more patient, and at one point in the midst of our going on comes neither of the drastic poles, but merely a cessation. I do not know what Akira Kurosawa’s final days or hours were like, I do not know how peaceably he met his fate. But I am certain he reached it with a greater serenity than most of us, for in his final film he’d given himself a marvelous reminder of the nobility of carrying on.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid

2000 Eyes: Time Regained

Written by Bruce Reid September 9, 2020September 8, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time, if you prefer the more accurate but, to me, less seductively euphonious title that’s been gaining currency of late) would certainly seem to stand out at the head of that notorious literary genre known as the “unfilmable novel.” It’s already defeated, in whole or part, two fine artists: Volker Schlöndorff, who made Swann’s Way,an admittedly well-acted but tepid and overly respectful chamber film; and Harold Pinter, whose clever but attenuated Proust Screenplay only made me grateful that funding never came through to realize the project.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: West Beirut

Written by Bruce Reid August 21, 2020August 11, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

There is a special category of war film that chooses not to merely restate the obvious lesson that war is a nightmare, but instead tries to capture the joy and riotous freedom that conflict can bring about, and trusts the audience to supply the rest of the story. This is the anarchy that John Boorman celebrated in Hope and Glory — the world turned upside down with children running gleefully through the rubble — and it motivates West Beirut as well. An autobiographical first feature by cameraman Ziad Doueiri, West Beirut collapses almost a decade of Lebanon’s brutal civil war into what, through the eyes of his youthful protagonists, seems like one delirious summer.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: 8 1/2 Women

Written by Bruce Reid August 7, 2020August 2, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

All of Peter Greenaway’s films depend less on human emotion than they do on a particularly fierce adherence to preordained patterns. Because of this insistence, they are curiously immune to criticism. Call them callous, misanthropic, inhuman (all of which they certainly are), whatever you like; for the Greenaway fan, such objections have simply missed the point. Depending on your belief — is art about people, or simply a way of ordering an incoherent universe? — he is either a fraud or one of the greatest filmmakers currently working. 8 1/2 Women, his latest film, is no exception. For his fans, it may well be the finest thing he’s done; the rest of us will find it as grotesque and unwatchable as the rest of the director’s output.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Following

Written by Bruce Reid July 22, 2020July 20, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

An unnamed, unemployed young man (Jeremy Theobald) fills up his empty days stalking random people, following them from a distance as they go about their daily routine. He justifies this pathetic habit by telling himself that he’s a writer, and this will be good research for his fiction, even though his output to date consists only of staring at his typewriter, the one object in his dingy, unpainted flat that appears not to have been plucked out of a garbage bin.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Quills

Written by Bruce Reid July 17, 2020July 12, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

The Marquis de Sade has been many things to many people, but the fact remains that he wrote for one person only: himself. It’s this very monomania that gives his works their coldly granitic fascination, page after page of mechanized sexual debasement hewn out like so many identical slabs of stone, and it’s also why he can disturb the most open-minded reader. Quills, the new movie loosely (very loosely) based upon the latter years of de Sade’s life, seeks to rehabilitate his image into that of Brave Soldier in the Noble Battle against Hypocrisy. This not only flattens and dulls the film’s subject, it also makes for one hell of a hypocritical movie in its own right.

2000 Eyes, by Bruce Reid, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Written by Bruce Reid July 10, 2020June 28, 2020 Leave a Comment

[Written for The Stranger]

The courtyards and compounds on display in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon pare elegant yet stifling domains, warmly beautiful but so hushed you can practically see the sounds being absorbed into the darkly lacquered wood. There’s no surprise, in these places, that legendary Wudan warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) can never declare his love for fellow martial-arts expert Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). When Li arrives at the home of his longtime friend and confesses to her that he’s retiring because his efforts to achieve enlightenment failed (his meditations instead leading him only to “a place of deep silence”), he might be describing the very room that holds their conversation, or even the conversation itself—a series of palpable desires and simmering glances whose meanings are left unspoken.