At Cannes, the opening night jitters extend to the audience: with very few exceptions (in the last decade, Almodovar’s Bad Education and… nothing else), the festival’s opening night offering is a guaranteed critical disaster. Oh, how I hope Fernando Meirelles, one of my very favorite filmmakers working today (based on two movies, sure, but City of God and The Constant Gardener are two fucking brilliant movies), doesn’t succumb to the Opening Night sickness like Mark Ruffalo to inexplicable blindness in this fifty-seven second clip from… Blindness (I was gonna try “inexplicable sightlessness”, but this sentence was doomed to suck either way).
Some scenes work great out of sequence (like, say, Judge Smails getting hit in the nuts with a golf ball), but this bit plays really awkward (like, say, the chick getting a fishhook through her cooter in The Mutilator). I really hate myself sometimes. But I hate bad marketing more, and while Meirelles’s mise en scene is impeccable (I especially like Ruffalo blurring into harshly backlit shapelessness in the mirror as he copes with his bizarre malady), this moment will turn off everyone but dedicated Meirelles heads. I think. Feel free to hit up the message board and tell me how wrong I am.
And keep your eyes peeled for the first reviews of Blindness tomorrow. Todd McCarthy’s Variety review will warrant a once over, but I’m most excited for the recently-liberated
-from-Premiere Glenn Kenny’s take. Further to Kenny, Some Came Running is not only a great name for a blog, it’s the title of a classic Vincente Minnelli movie you should all buy on DVD posthaste.