Thursday, July 22, 2010

"Did she just...?"


[Great Moments in Screen Bitchery #993, Julianne Moore in Blindness]

The "unseeing" Doctor's Wife sticks it to the guards.
*

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love her in this film!

remy

JoFo said...

She was the only good thing about this absolute turkey of a film. It was honestly one of the worst movies Ive ever due to the fact that it reached so high... and failed soooo miserably. I blame that script. And the editing.

Anonymous said...

JoFo, I agree. That movie was a steaming turd, so I have Julianne to blame for making me watch it.

cal roth said...

Come on, it's not that bad. It's not even bad. It's overcooked. B-/C+

But I Love Moore in it. She's electrifying, full of energy without overacting or losing focus. It's not easy to keep this level of control when your part is THAT emotional.

Hey, now you're near the end of Meryl @60, you can start Julianne @50 when December comes!

cal roth said...

Two more things on Blindness:

a) I love the cinematography. Gold medal.

b) I loved Meirelles' diaries. It would be a great book. His insights into moviemaking are really deep and pointful - too bad things didn't work out so well this time.

Frey said...

I feel guilty of admiting this but liked Blindness.
Not great, but a not zero.

SoSueMe said...

Ok, I admit I only saw the second half of the film...but I agree with Frey...it was so disturbing and fascinating.

stjeans said...

saw The Kids are alright & I think that the Bening/Moore couple is one of the hottest ever put on screen. Respective husband be warned!

cinephile said...

One of my favorite scenes of the film. Sickly funny, kind of satisfying, but actually heartbreaking.

And it stands for Moore's performance: Subtle but powerful. She was so good in this, much better than in Savage Grace the same year IMO - which was a performance that had great moments but was also kind of inconsistent.
But Blindness: One of her best - and most overlooked - performances, in a terribly underrated film. I can understand the 'overcooked' argument (even if I don't share this opinion), but I will NEVER understand why people use the superlative "worst" to describe this film. Even if one doesn't like it, it's undeniably an interesting, astonishing cinematic experience.

Jorge Rodrigues said...

I didn't hate 'Blindness' or Moore in it, but you have to admit that BLINDNESS THE BOOK is one of the toughest masterpieces to adapt to film.

And if Fernando Meirelles couldn't do it (even more so because he must have adapted from the Portuguese version of it) then who could?

And FYI - José Saramago liked the film.

Anonymous said...

The cinematography was astounding. Completely robbed.

Craig Bloomfield said...

Part of me feels that Blindness is the type of film that folk may look a lot more kindly on with, say, a decade's worth of hindsight than they did at the time.

It's not some kind of masterwork - which is perhaps what many of the staunch devotees of Saramago's book were hoping for - and it didn't have a solidly definable cause (i.e. zombies, winged beasts, or such similar) for the apocalyptic shenanigans - something that some folk might have found lacking. But it was infinitely more interesting than, say, The Book of Eli, and a whole host of other end-'o-da-world movies.

And when Moore appeared at the London Film Festival last year - and the interviewer asked about Blindness' reception - she said she felt disappointed that many people overlooked it and didn't see many of the film's technical subtlties. (She went on to talk eloquently about aspects of the film that I, and indeed the whole audience it seemed, hadn't noticed.)

Mind you, if Blindness HAD contained winged beasts I'd have been equally as happy with it.