Blindness
by Fernando Meirelles
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Danny Glover, Don McKellar, Julianne Moore, Maury Chaykin, Sandra OhDirector: Fernando Meirelles
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
Published: 2009-02-01
DVD Release Date: 2009-02-10
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MIRAMAX
Product features:
- TESTED
Movie Reviews of Blindness
Movie Review: Masterfully and faithfully transferred the message about human nature and values from Saramago's novel to the screen
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is based on the excellent 1995 novel by Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer José Saramago (Blindness or the original Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, Portuguese Edition). Brazilian director Meirelles (City of God and The Constant Gardener ) successfully conveyed Saramago's literature work to the screen, honoring the title of cinema as the seventh art and demonstrating again his creativity and competence as a movie director. As usual, good cinema is almost always not a commercial success, and this explains the harsh criticism by some movie critics and the disappointment of many movie goers.
As a quick warning, if you dislike odd movies with shocking content but with quite a philosophical message, such as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, then do not waste your time and money buying/watching this movie. But if decide to you give it a try, please, do not expect a logical explanation for such a rare event as to all people but one going blind in an unnamed city, with characters with no name. It doesn't matter, and it is completely irrelevant for the message Saramago indented. This is a story that lets you think and reflect on human values and our true nature, in a modern society that is more worry about money and so many superfluous things.
São Paulo city is the main background for the movie, though some scenes were also shot in Toronto, and old town Montevideo, Uruguay. Despite the strong Portuguese and Latin American origin and influences of the film (actor Gael García Bernal is Mexican and actress Alice Braga is Brazilian), the movie was produced in English language, and casting renowned American actors Julliane Moore, Dany Glover and Mark Ruffalo, in order to reach out to wider audiences in North America, Europe and Asia. The script faithfully follows the original novel storyline, with the normal simplifications imposed by the limited running time, and above all, by softening and blurring some of the most brutal, cruel and shocking events in the original novel, but without sacrificing the message Saramago intended for the readers. Even though at some point it begins to look like a boring "end of the world" flick or if you find the raping scene too shocking, hold on and do not get confused, wait until the end, that this movie about a powerful message regarding human feelings, instincts and values, that will really make you wonder about our western society's values and about our human nature.
If you really enjoy the movie, I highly recommend you to read the original literary work, and also Death with Interruptions (Intermitências Da Morte, Portuguese Edition), another novel by Saramago, on which he again plays with a fantastical scenario, but his time citizens of an unnamed country do not die. In this work he explores other aspects of human nature in a less brutal and more humorous way. Again, no logical explanation is necessary for such a rare event to occur, and again it doesn't matter, though actually a very silly explanation is provided.
Summary of Blindness
BLINDNESS - DVD MovieBased on José Saramago's allegorical novel, Blindness is a haunting film that works like an unusual fusion of fable and gritty suspense. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo star as an unnamed, married couple living in an unidentified city where a mass epidemic of blindness hits. Ruffalo's character, a doctor, is affected, but Moore's is not. When the two are transferred to a government-run quarantine facility complete with armed guards, they soon find themselves in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Criminals take over food distribution and extort possessions and sex from the innocent. Sanitation becomes a thing of the past. More subtly, rules that might govern one's judgement and behavior on an everyday basis simply vanish, and personal and collective values rewrite themselves. Moore's character hides the fact that she can see (except from her spouse), and thus becomes the audience's surrogate in the thick of so much misery. She also becomes an avenging angel at exactly the right time, and then a matriarch when the action shifts from the quarantine hell to the city's streets. The latter part of Blindness finds a handful of the inmates (played by Danny Glover and Alice Braga, among others) joining Moore and Ruffalo in a kind of post-apocalypse oasis, a chapter as touching as the previous chapters were nightmarish.
Director Fernando Meirelles deftly captures the film's spirit of mixed parable and horror, grounding the action but at the same time encouraging a viewer not to take it too literally. He honors Saramago's creative depiction of blindness not as a field of black but, in this case, as an ocean of white. He also does some tricky, disorienting things with the camera, shooting at odd angles, putting his frame around strange details in a scene--all of it has a way of giving a viewer a feeling of what it's like to perceive the world in a whole new way. --Tom Keogh
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