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Blindness |
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Nothing to see here |
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Director
: Fernando Meirelles Cast : Julianne
Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Danny
Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal. |
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Set in a generic unnamed city - it could
be your city! - Blindness kicks off with
a Japanese motorist, listed in the
credits only as First Blind Man (Yusuke
Iseya), going blind. He's driven home by
a stranger, who promptly steals his car. |
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Yusuke's lovely wife, First Blind Man's
Wife (Yoshino Kimura), takes him to an
eye specialist, Doctor (Mark Ruffalo),
and the blindness spreads to the
physician, his patients and subsequently
the world. |
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The only person who doesn't go blind is
Doctor's Wife (Julianne Moore), who
accompanies her husband to an abandoned
sanitarium, where he and the rest of the
sightless are kept under quarantine. |
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From this point, Blindness segues from
being a potentially thrilling
end-of-the-world movie to a grim prison
picture. As blind people shamble around
in various states of undress, the
sanitarium becomes increasingly filthy
and dangerous. A former bartender (Gael
Garcia Bernal) somehow finds a gun, and
declares himself king, gathering around
him a group of like-minded idiots. They
force those outside their clique to pay
for the dwinding food supply with
jewellery and, much more appallingly,
sexual favours. |
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An almost childishly allegorical tale,
Blindness dithers around for two hours
trying to expound upon the idea that in
the land of the blind, the one-eyed man
is king, as Garl Garcia Bernal's
maniacal bartender is contrasted against
Doctor's Wife, who takes care of her
husband and the others with a mother's
tenderness. |
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Not to say that it is good to be king -
director Fernando Meirelles' world, it
isn't particularly good to be anybody. |
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Meirelles takes what could have been a
very fun B-movie premise - everyone in
the world goes blind - and arts it up to
a ridiculous degree. Of course, the film
is based on a book by Nobel
prize-winning author Jose Saramago, so
the director no doubt felt a certain
amount of pressure to make an Important
Piece of Work, but that's no excuse for
the inappropriate "bleak chic"
cinematography of for the way he seems
to revel in human squalidness. |
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In fairness, there are certain moments
of poetry in Blindness that make you
wish it were a better picture. When
Doctor's Wife befriends a stray dog,
there's a simple beauty to it, an
unforced naturalness that pushes back
against the trying-too-hard vibe we get
throughout most of the film. Ultimately,
this is a queasy-making piece of work. |
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For Further
Information, please buy a copy of FIRST @ myNEWS.com
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