I have no idea why this is being trashed. It's pretty awesome.

Thank you for saying that. I'm definitely going later. Meirelles!

Ebert's trashing of this thing made me more curious than any rave could have done.

I'm inherently distrustful of myself. When I like a film with such bad reviews I assume I am completely wrong. So if you hate it, don't blame me.

But Fernando Meirelles, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal and Julianne Moore? Working with a Saramago novel? Can't get much better than that. And it's really interesting (and completely unwavering) aesthetically. Most of the time it hovers near the top of the best looking films of the year. Also, it's often very, very powerful (at times "seat-squirming" uncomfortably so). etc.

I just read Eberts review and he is way off base. Especially about the noise. I'm glad it got you interested, because it'd be a shame if that review made someone skip this film.

I have to agree w/ the critics on this one. It starts out promising enough with the mysterious blindess spreading through the general populace, but things slowly unravel as the infected are quarantined. Despite being the only one that can, you know, SEE, Julianne Moore's character is apparently incapable of doing anything to stop the blind baddies, unless she can find her magical pair of scissors. As it stumbles along (how appropriate) we go past a montage of blind people engaging in simultaneous violent sex, Julianne Moore gazing wistfully at dogs eating a blind man on the stairs, and several nifty camera tricks to simulate what it is like to be blind (so original). The film grows increasingly absurd and heavyhanded until it finally parks itself back at the starting gate. There are strong performances here and it is an interesting failure...but it is indeed, a failure. C-

Alright, i'll first say that i didn't get to finish this movie due to certain circumstances... My following review is based purely off of what i saw. Btw, i got up to the rape sequences.

http://nevadasagebrush.com/blog/2008/10/07/blindingly-bad/

I don't see where you guys are coming from in thinking that this was a good movie.

You shouldnt publish a review of a film that you didnt see in its entirety without mentioning that fact.

I hate to say it, but I think Blindness is a turkey. It baffled me going in how something with such a can't-miss pedigree coud get so trashed, but I think I get it now.

For one, this thing is fucked on a conceptual level. This material doesn't, or can't, separate itself from other, similar films about totally hopeless futures. Just sub out blindness for zombies, nuclear fallout, or whatever flavor of societal destruction you like. New plate, same food. On the page, this apparently worked wonders, but we've seen this film before. So many times. And it seems to me that Meirelles maybe knew he was working with some warmed-over plotting, which would explain the monstrously irritating visuals we have to suffer through for two hours. Blindness is aesthetically very, very ambitious, but I think their experiment failed. The whitewash scene transitions are bad enough, before all the visuals start emerging from a milky fog; you'll be forgiven if you start to think you've wandered into a very rough part of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Hell, I don't even understand this visual scheme. In the film, Julianne Moore sees fine, while everyone else sees nothing but white. So why the fuck do we, the audience, have to watch a movie mucking around unhappily in the middle of those? Although, every once in a while, in what struck me as a strange act of prudity in this turd seeing as it always happened when sex was involved, things get visually dark and indistinct. Very dark and indistinct.

Special mention to the interminable middle section, which seemed like it comprised 75% of the movie. This is where the heavy-handed allegory gets most painful and we have to suffer through some of the most repetitive cinema of the year as the quarantine so predictably turns into- get this!- a microcosm of the outside world, complete with famine and war and power struggles and all that fun stuff. Hooray. And it just goes on, and on, and on. The sheer tidy triteness of all of this doesn't even hold through this section, as much of the meaning seems lost since our friends in Ward A are so gosh-darn sensible. I think all I got out of this, then, was "a few good apples ruin the whole bunch." I kid, but Blindness has not a single interesting thing to say.

The on-the-nose dialogue and symbolic, eye-related images start to get pretty funny after a while. My favorite exchange must have been:
- "I don't want to know what you look like."
"Then how can we know each other?"
Hey now! In terms of goofy imagery, I'm going to vote for the close-up on that girls sunglasses while she's being paid for the sex. Yeeeeeeeeeech. It's like someone saw the recurring motif of eyes in Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors and thought it deserved a whole movie of its own. It didn't.

Well, the girl that i went with had issues with the rape sequences... big issues. I would normally always stick it out, but fealt it was more important to tend to her. As a note, this was my first time walking out of a movie... ever... Secondly, since i didn't see the whole thing, i was just going for a brief little review that got the message across that it is really disturbing. I didn't want to go in-depth since i didn't get to finish it.

I'm going to go with Kypade and Loyal and continue to hope for this films awesomeness!!

I'm so happy this is bombing. We don't need any more films based on stuff written by dictator loving writers.

I thought it was quite good. Perhaps very good. Actors all did a superb job. I agree with this quote I found on RT: "Meirelles gets perhaps the best work ever out of the overrated Julianne Moore."

Although to be honest, I really don't know if I'll ever watch this movie again. Specifically due to one nearly overwhelming sequence that occurs in the middle of the film.

B+/A-

BLINDNESS (2008)

What a huge surprise! "Blindness" blew me away. It's the most underrated film of the year. Had I been one of the first people to see it I'd have been expecting some serious Oscar attention. After seeing it I can't imagine why it didn't receive a better response. The film is amazing on every level. Currently it's the best of the year that I've seen. If it doesn't remain that way, it will at least be one of the very best.

Grade: 9/10 (A)

Oh, I hated it.

Favourite part was Danny Glover telling the children's story.