Blindness

Beginning in a near future time, in a nondescript, multicultural city, people will catch the disease of blindness. A blindness causing pathogen will spread through the tiers of society and drive people to commit unspeakable cruelties and atrocities due to their evil, blind nature. The uncaring government will turn a blind eye and the faceless, money-grubbing health industry will turn away the newly diseased masses like stinky asses. The movie Blindness chronicles this horrible future event. It’s a scary, apocalyptic prophecy from Fernando Meirelles, the director of City of God and The Constant Gardener. It’s based on a book of the same name by an author named Jose Saramago. It stars Julianne Moore, Danny “frequently lisping” Glover, Mark Ruffalo, and Gael Garcia Bernal. There are also a bunch of actors I don't know featured in its multicultural cast. You see, the disease of blindness affects everyone equally. It’s how you deal with this unspeakable horror that matters.

Blindness will cause you to act like a mental retard. You’ll lose any coordination or athletic ability you once possessed and stumble around like Kevin James in a mall. Or like Steve Martin. You’ll wave your hands out in front of you as you constantly run into polls, crush your nuts or vaginas on cement planters, and trip over shopping carts. You’ll moan a lot. The evil government will quarantine your sorry ass in an old building and ignore you. Sure, they’ll give you a little bit of food, but you’ll have to fight over it with the other blind assholes that are imprisoned with you. You’ll throw your trash on the floor and you’ll stop wearing clothes and wander around naked, cockandballs swaying from side to side. You won’t bathe or brush your teeth or wipe your own ass. In fact, you’ll completely forget how to use a toilet, so you’ll piss and shit on the floor in the hallway and then you’ll fuck like animals in the piss and shit. The hardfuck. Grunting like pigs. You’ll fuck strangers for food and pity. You’ll even smile and dance to shitty music played on a portable AM radio by an African-American with a pirate eye-patch and a milky eye (2%, I think). All of the sudden, the sound of some out of tune piano gives you peace. If it rains, you’ll dance outside in the downpour, raising your hands in jubilatory gestures. You'll sing a Stevie Wonder tune while mocking his familiar head bobbing, cause it's funny. You’ll cheat on your wife and fuck a prostitute. You’ll bite and murder and scream and tell stories to cute little blind kids. Fucking blindness, man…it’s a travesty.

This is a terrible movie. It’s easily one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time because it tries so hard to be good (with its "indie cred" actors and its hot new foreign director), to be meaningful, to make a statement about our current world and where it might be going, and it fails completely. The direction is uninspired, nearly every new scene beginning with a fade from white and every scene ending in a fade to white. I get it. Blindness. The director tries to give the film a rough, documentary-like look but it doesn’t mix well with the over-the-top stage style acting and cheesy dialogue. I know people will say that I didn’t get the allegory or the layered meanings or whatever, but fuck that, this movie just doesn’t work on any level. And it's really boring. The actors act like they're retarded, not like they're blind. It's sad that this director can't tell the difference. I haven’t read the book and I never will. I read Saramago’s All The Names and felt it was a sorry attempt at Kafka. Maybe I didn’t get that either (after all, he got a Nobel Prize for Literature).