Sunday, February 22, 2009

Occasional Movie Review:
Blindness

In a word: crapness.

(Super-duper spoiler alert. Entire stupid movie synopsized below)

This is the kind of flick you might make it through if you were really, really jonesing for some sci-fi. But it suuu-uucks. Do not watch it unless absolutely necessary. Unless, say, your only other option is something ultra-sucky like, say, Lost in Space.

So Julianne Moore and some other people get locked up in a concentration camp for having this blindness plague, except JM doesn't really have it, she's just going to be with her blind husband. The concentration camp doesn't make any sense at all, because no doctors even come in, not even in biohazard suits, not even to do any experiments to find out why everyone is going blind. Occasionally soldiers will come in with no biohazard gear on and threaten to shoot people, and occasionally they'll shoot people outside for no apparent reason. Inside, a handful of the blind inmates are evil, and declare that they are taking over and refuse to let anyone else have food. Now, although they only have one revolver, it does have an infinite number of rounds, and never has to be reloaded. But, of course, they are blind, so the gun is useless. Except somehow it isn't. However, JM's husband and the rest of the non-evil blind people are such extreme cowards and morons that they agree to give up all their possessions for two boxes of food, apparently figuring "I guess those guys will be nice once they have all our stuff!" Then they demand all the women so they can rape them, a demand to which all the cowardly non-evil-but-extremely stupid inmates immediately acceed. In fact the women seem way, way less averse to this plan than you might think. There is something really, really creepy about either the writer or the director or both of this piece of crap. After the mass rape, the evil guys walk around taunting people, and finally the other people decide to fight back. The place burns down, everybody gets out, but by then everybody's blind and wandering the streets fighting over granola bars. Then JM and crew go to her and her husband's preposterously stylish house and have more weird naked scenes, and then there's a shitty ending.

Movie grade: D+. Warning! Do not see!

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Too bad. It looked like it could have been good.

10:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

1) They're in the nonsense sanitarium to provide some kind of important moral lesson about how fear of the unknown will divide us into tyrants and people who roll over for tyrants. You know, GWOT stuff. That's supposed to make up for the rest. Like in "28 Weeks Later". Why is the army trying to repopulate the post-zombie UK? Why, if they are, does it have to start in East End London of all places? Oh yeah, so the cast can use terms like "green zone" while everything goes to hell, sprinkling the hole-filled plot with allegorical glitter.

2) Lost in Space is not a good movie, not by a sight, but it has Gary Oldman as Dr. Smith, giving a speech about how his belly full of monster babies are going to take over the world. After tipping back a few drinks, the movie is capable of being fun, unlike Blindness. Blindness is like a listening to a professor who manages to be both dull and shrill at the same time.

3) After a review in which, amoungst other things, you suggest that the director has violent, misogynist tendencies and said "Warning, Do Not See!", you gave it a D+? Have those grade inflation creeps gotten to you too? What does it take to fail?

11:07 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yeah, you got me on that inflated grade, A.

I thought about an 'F', but then thought that the beginning had been at least minimally interesting, and just about any type of sci-fi and/or apocalyptic movie holds *some* interest for me, and then thought about all the movies that are just flat-out ****ing unwatchable, and thought, since I'd actually finished watching this one, and it had good production values and all that crap, that I just couldn't justify squeezing it into the overpopulated category of 'F' movies.

But you may be right about that.

7:49 AM  

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