Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Brilliant and touching

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Blindness (2008), directed by Fernando Meirelles, is an adaptation of José Saramago's novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira that tells the story of a society that falls victim to a sudden surge of blindness. The film is an extraordinary adaptation. It pictures a lot of the details of the book, such as places and scenes that are fundamental to the plot.The where and when the story happens is not mentioned and to express this idea in the film the director made a great choice by mixing elements of various nationalities. The language used is English, but the license plates look similar to Brazilian plates, the images of the city are taken from cities from different countries and the cast is really diverse. Also, none of the characters has a name, and fortunately this wasn't modified in the movie. As a great fan of the novel, these were the first details that I was expecting to see because they create the perfect atmosphere to the plot. Speaking of plot, just a few things were changed and it didn't bring any harm to the original story. While I was watching, I started to remember certain scenes from the novel and I was trying to imagine how these scenes would be portrayed in the film. I wasn't disappointed at all. Of course some parts were left out, but it wasn't a great loss, they were well adapted to be shorter than the novel. I've seen some negative reviews talking about how the film can cause a bad feeling to the audience, but I can't see how this is a bad thing, because that is exactly the purpose of the whole story. It is to cause discomfort, to show the reality we could live. The graphic scenes can be too strong to the more sensitive but they were unavoidable. All I can say is that Blindness is a well made adaptation that doesn't disappoint those who read the novel. The direction is brilliant, the actors are great and the story is told in full. Even if you didn't read the novel, it is a great way to meet José Saramago's brilliant work.

The film does not match what I have imagined when I read the book. The scenario of the film is quite similar to the story however the image, the way it's filmed and the colours caused a lost of originality that the book offers, the book has lost its soul when it has been filmed. Worth watching though.

Film Review: "Blindless" (2008)Technically well-observed by Director Fernando Meirelles and Cinematogrpaher César Charlone with an overexposed image system exchanging whites and deep blacks shot on 35mm Filmstock providing the picture with an proper dystopian contemporary look within a forty-five minute sequence in a kind of cell block quarantine situation, where sudden blinded people fight for food supplies enrages over all giving away any properties to ultimately sharing sexual intercourse to reach the goal of nutrition, which leads consequently to war, theft and murder on which this independently shot film production shys away to show the real horror, when it becomes to the loss of existential life support.Director Fernando Meirelles took on another highly controversy topic, after the theme of unofficial drug testing on human beings in Africa with his film "The Constant Gardener" (2005), in which he asks a fundamental question of the happening, when a community loses one of their essential senses simultaneously. Actress Julianne Moore as the character of an anonymous doctor's wife leading her husband, performed by with no further high pitch given beat actor Mark Ruffalo and a bunch of blind-sided people through a abandoned metropole city to a place of an state of emotional nowhere's. Again the director breaks under its weight of his own theme-given spine.Nevertheless "Blindless" has been still an inconvenient picture for its center cell block sequence, and had been righteously put into Cannes Film Festival's competition in the year 2008, where actor Gael Garcia Bernal and actress Alice Braga brought some thrilling danger to the scenery, yet under the given screenplay adaptation by Don McKellar and the timid direction by Fernando Mereilles, the picture stays a high-concept drama with some mystical visual ingredients, which wanted to be a full-blown Thriller from start to finish.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

We've already had disaster movies about ice age, nuclear war, large space rocks plopping on our dumb collective heads, zombies, virus plagues, killer bunnies, killer bees and many more. So perhaps it was time to lend a comical twist to this genre with some slapstick. What can bring more mass slapstick than everyone turning blind?But - this isn't a comedy. This is for real. That blind guy BLACKMAILING blind women to sleep with him and his blind gang (he has a gang???) was NOT intended to be funny. I don't understand how, but it was intended to be powerful, thrilling, moving drama. It moved me alright: I blew snot out of my nose watching blind men sexually harass blind women. I don't think I've seen anything quite as inane as a blind man waving around with a gun threatening to kill people. (I know, it sounds even funnier on paper, but trust me, seeing it is the real deal.) Shouldn't Eddie Murphy be doing that in a cheesy comedy?So let me get this right: a group of blind men act as thugs by holding all the other blind people hostage to their silly demands (which includes money and wrist-watches - utterly worthless items in that environment). Why wasn't this on Monty Python, frcrissakes. I bet Palin and Cleese were smashing their left-wing heads against the walls, wondering "how come we didn't think of this?!" No, I am not talking about another Python sketch. I'm talking about a fourth Python movie! Julianne Moore – very conveniently – sneaks into the quarantine facility, acting as the eyes of the group. Does she ever for a second consider how EASY-PEASY it would be to snatch a gun from a blind man? She could have prevented that entire sex-gang segment from turning this into another "Battlefield Earth", just by taking his gun away. But it didn't suit the writers' intentions. That's a classic case of an incompetent writer relentlessly pushing a moronic plot-device just so the story moves come-hell-or-high-water into the desired direction.I just wonder why the writer-fool didn't milk the blind-gang shtick to its full potential. The entire movie could have been about that. For example, what if leader thug decided that all the others had to perform a play for his gang? Wouldn't that have been just as funny? What if he decided that the women had to form a girl-power pop-group, complete with sexy dance moves? (Yes, the blind wouldn't be able to see the dancing, but since when is this movie concerned with trifles such as logic and common sense?)The more intelligent movie-goers (you know… the non-hipster ones) complain about the extremely stupid dialogue and the flat, lethargic acting. They have every right to complain, because the conversations are generally imbecilic, and the performances just plain lazy. Julianne Moore has a perpetual moronic grin that makes her looked stoned. She's the Mother Teresa of the movie, and she hams it up as only she knows how to. Admittedly, Meryl Streep would have been far worse, hamming it up with a badly done bizarre accent, no doubt. (As for Mother Teresa, that's just an expression. You didn't seriously think that I consider her a saintly person? The woman was a greedy, lying, two-faced, evil witch assigned the phony image of a Nightingale by those pedos from Vatican, with generous help from the lobotomized international zombie press.)Moore is so sickeningly understanding and so Hollywoodly compassionate that she doesn't even get too offended when her husband cheats on her with another woman. In a PROPER comedy (as opposed to an unintentional one) Moore would have slapped him around, him not being able to defend himself and that would have been both realistic and hilarious; a win-win situation: all bloodied and embarrassed (for being beaten up by his tiny wife who also wipes his hinder), he could have said something like "oh come on, honey, give a guy a break! I'm blind, she's blind, we're so miserable, can't you just continue feeling sorry for us and let us get on with the in-out?" Oh the fun I'd have re-writing this stupid script.The movie improves a lot (which isn't saying much) once the blind group breaks out of its silly prison camp and ventures outside. There are some nice post-apocalyptic scenes of garbage and chaos, and that's what the movie should have been about, instead of putting us through the torture of watching these clowns fumble about for an hour in some exaggerated Nazi camp. That's the wrong type of garbage and chaos.Speaking of which, I don't know what flaming Marxist wrote the novel this drivel is based on, but he must suffer from severe paranoia if he actually believes that any government – in a functioning, wealthy democracy – would treat a bunch of infected mystery patients like utter garbage. Jesus wept, if the gov't were so vicious, wouldn't the prisons be run like concentration camps? Wouldn't the media experience extreme Putin-like censorship? Set this idiocy in Putin's Russia or that round-headed mongrel's North Korea and it would at least make some sense, but the notion that the blind would simply be segregated – and then basically left to fend for themselves (!) in the States or Canada is asinine, bizarre and very much the result of a deluded left-winger's psychotic episodes no doubt brought about by an excessive intake of Bolivian mushrooms and numerous viewings of Michael Moore's propaganda "documentaries". Whoever wrote this garbage should get the anti-Nobel Prize for Anti-Literature. This premise is dumber than Philip K. Dick's "Counter-Clock World".