Reading Reed

Rex Reed lives in a Manichean world, where every film is great or horrible. (I'd like to live in that world, it sounds exciting.) In his latest column, he praises Flags Of Our Fathers to the skies (haven't seen it yet) and excoriates The Prestige.

I wouldn't care, except he clearly didn't understand the latter. This apparently made him mad, so he calls it "incomprehensible gibberish," an "incoherent tale" that "doesn’t make one lick of sense." The plot's a bit tricky, but it's not that hard to follow.

He doesn't stop there. He condemns director Christopher Nolan's work in general, calling Memento "despicable" and Batman Begins--the best Batman movie ever made--"the worst Batman movie ever made."

Reed can't even get the basics right, saying the trick Hugh Jackman wants to steal from Christian Bale is where he "get[s] out of his chains inside a water tank" when it could not be clearer that it's the one where he seems to travel across the stage instantaneously.

Worse, Reed (unwittingly?) gives away the biggest secrets of The Prestige, mostly by listing the questions his apparently clueless compatriot critics asked after the screening. So don't read this review until after you've seen the film. Better yet, don't read it at all.