Friday, April 03, 2009
Blindness
J and I watched Blindness over the previous two nights. It is based upon the book by 1998 Nobel Prize winner in literature Jose Saramago called "Blindness". The premise is a city (filmed in lovely Montevideo, Uruguay but unnamed in the book) is stricken by a plague of white blindness. The first people are quarantined to an older unused hospital. It goes from scary to depths of humanity pretty quickly. Most everyone is blind except for the doctor's wife (played by the always great Julianne Moore aka Maude from The Big Lebowski) who must be the sole eye witness to the depravity and vile sanitary conditions. A group of people (maybe criminals) take over one ward and take all the food and extort the other people. They eventually figure out that the soldiers at the gate are gone and they can leave and see what happened to the city. The small band of main characters make their way to the doctor's house and pick up a cute dog on the way. Their blindness eventually goes away and supposedly life returns to normal.
Definitely not for kids, not too much language, some female breasts and lots of asses. The one complaint I have is the removal of one of my favorite scenes from the book. Julianne's character finds a staircase at the back of a virtually empty grocery store which leads to a locked door where they keep the extra food. Since everyone is blind, they did not see the key hanging on a nearby hook. Doc's wife goes down, feels around, finds some matches, grabs some food, leaves and FORGETS TO LOCK THE DOOR! She comes back a few days later and the blind people have found the cache of lovely food, created a stampede and she returns to find the place on fire and basically hell on earth. Doh! Maybe next time she'll remember to lock the best place to find unspoiled food in the city that only she knows about.
The movie leaves that part out presumably because it didn't add much to the story, but I liked that part of the book. Even though she can see doesn't mean she catches everything.
I've always wanted to try a blind day or at least a blind hour or so. I think I'll do that once I'm done writing.
Definitely not for kids, not too much language, some female breasts and lots of asses. The one complaint I have is the removal of one of my favorite scenes from the book. Julianne's character finds a staircase at the back of a virtually empty grocery store which leads to a locked door where they keep the extra food. Since everyone is blind, they did not see the key hanging on a nearby hook. Doc's wife goes down, feels around, finds some matches, grabs some food, leaves and FORGETS TO LOCK THE DOOR! She comes back a few days later and the blind people have found the cache of lovely food, created a stampede and she returns to find the place on fire and basically hell on earth. Doh! Maybe next time she'll remember to lock the best place to find unspoiled food in the city that only she knows about.
The movie leaves that part out presumably because it didn't add much to the story, but I liked that part of the book. Even though she can see doesn't mean she catches everything.
I've always wanted to try a blind day or at least a blind hour or so. I think I'll do that once I'm done writing.
Labels: book, inhuman, J, movie, review
# posted by Seth @ 10:05 AM 
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