Amy Adams Takes a Piece of Janis Joplin's Heart

They've been trying to put together a Janis Joplin bio-pic for ages. In the past decade, Pink and Melissa Etheridge have both been trying to get separate projects off the ground. And there was the Zooey Deschanel movie, which may have been one of the ones we already mentioned. And it's believed that's the one making news at the end of this week.

Twilight co-producer Wyck Godfrey tells FearNet that Amy Adams will now play Joplin, and that'll take all she's got. If she pulls it off, that's going to be something. It is hard to picture the sweet girl from Enchanted leading Big Brother and the Holding Company and overdosing on heroin, but both of those things have to be on the menu. We do know Adams can sing, though, so that's a start.

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Movie Review - 'Blindness'

Blindness

Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Gael Garcia Bernal
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Rated R

It's a tough position to be in, wanting something to be better than it is. I don't have kids, but if I did, I imagine I'd have to pretend to like a lot of school plays and soccer games. Chicago Cubs fans have had to pretend for 100 years that they actually believe this is the year, despite evidence to the contrary (again). With Blindness, I wanted badly to appreciate it more than it deserves. I just can't. In 2002, I discovered a little movie called City of God. I shared it with everyone I could. At the time, it was not yet nominated for four Oscars and had no reputation as being one of the best films of the decade. That came later. But I sold it hard and professed the talents of its director, Fernando Meirelles.Now, of course, everybody knows what City of God is, and the fact that it's currently ranked 19th on the IMDB list of the greatest films ever - between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Once Upon a Time in the West - is no big surprise. If you haven't watched it, it really is among the two or three dozen best films I've ever seen. In 2006, Meirelles directed The Constant Gardener, an underrated and very depressing film that nonetheless won Rachel Weisz a well-deserved Academy Award. It wasn't a step up, because that would've been nearly impossible, but it firmly established him as an important director. And here we are today with Blindness; Meirelles has not reminded us of his former glory. Though the film has, in my opinion, the most interesting cinematography of the year in terms of its use of color and imagery, the story is an absolute disaster and many of the actors are so completely unrestrained that I wouldn't blame you for walking out. This is a very hard film to watch. I, of course, reserved some hope that the end would justify the means, but it didn't work out that way. A pandemic of sudden blindness spreads throughout the land. We don't know what country this is, exactly. It looks like Europe, maybe one of the modernized cities in Spain, but the U.S. dollar is the currency and the population is a regular United Colors of Benetton ad. The implication, I guess, is that this could happen anywhere at any time. (Blindness was shot in Uruguay, Brazil, and Canada.) An ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) diagnoses a patient who went blind in his car, and though he feels no pain, can only see white, the presence of all light, as opposed to black. The next morning, the doctor wakes up blind. So does most of the rest of civilization. The doctor's wife (Julianne Moore) is spared. She can see perfectly. When the quarantine of the blind is put into effect, the wife fakes blindness to be with her husband. The quarantine is as you'd expect: The government throws its unwanted masses into an abandoned hospital, hands them a few boxes of food, locks the gate, and says, "You're on your own." We're supposed to learn from the metaphor that follows. These people don't have to be blind, they just have to be stranded, nervous, and forced into a position to choose life for themselves or life for their fellow captives. There are "wards" of patients in this lockdown, all of which name their own leader and take on the personality of its new chief. One of the wards is evil, wants all the food for itself, and will only distribute it to the others at great personal sacrifice. Once the secondary drama kicks in, once we're over the fact that people just lost the ability to see for no reason, Blindness is simply an embarrassing motion picture. The scenes get more and more drastic, but because of the environment, this is more like one of those exploitation movies from the 70s that takes place in a woman's prison than it is a serious analysis of human nature. It's like Caged Heat with a really good director. Worse still is the way the conflict within the hospital is resolved and the action that follows it. There might be a lesson here, but I can't see it. So maybe I'm the one who's blind. Because the mere fact that the world goes blind is pushed to a greater extreme - a less-than-realistic plane even - the actors lose sight of the humanity in their characters. Julianne Moore can be a great actress, but she can overact better than anyone else in her generation, and she's on that path again here. Gael Garcia Bernal, the risk-taking Mexican star of Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien, is so one-dimensional and outlandish that he makes the villains in Death Race seem restrained by comparison. There will be better films by Fernando Meirelles, just as there have been better films pursuing this metaphor. I sense that he really tried to make Blindness into a great movie, but he has very clearly failed.

Tomorrow, the new dystopian drama Blindness will arrive in theaters. It's been a long road for the adaptation of Jose Saramago's 1995 novel. The film first premiered at Cannes, on the festival's opening night in May. Reaction to it was not overwhelmingly positive, and we know what happens when audiences don't love a movie at a film festival (snip snip). So five months later, here we are again, with director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) helming the story of a blindness pandemic that leads to a total breakdown of society. Though we don't see them in this clip, there are some actors in Blindness whose work you're more than familiar with: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, and Gael Garcia Bernal. Here's the first five minutes of Blindness, a clip that absolutely sets up the action that follows.

Advocacy Group Calls for 'Blindness' Boycott

The last time we had a movie protest, I thought that those boycotting Tropic Thunder had a workable point. Yes, there is humor in that movie that emanates from a mentally retarded character. The function of the Simple Jack character was not to laugh at him for his deficiencies but rather to laugh knowingly at Hollywood and movie stars for their often sad and regrettable interpretations of the mentally disabled in film. Granted, Simple Jack was a lot funnier in the movie within the movie than it was as a gratuitous third act add-on, but I could understand why it would be offensive to groups that are charged with protecting the interests of the mentally disabled. I didn't think it was a reason to not see the movie, but if someone else chose not to, that would have been fine. However, the latest movie protest is just laughable. Indefensible. Marc Mauer of The National Federation for the Blind is outraged at the portrayal of the sightless in the new drama, Blindness, and he thinks it could further prevent blind people from being integrated into the mainstream, according to The Hollywood Reporter. A protest is planned for this weekend. Mauer claims that the actions of the characters in the movie, who are all stricken by a civilization-wide immediate blindness and turn into savages that trade sex for food, among other things, are offensive. He's missing the point, though. The movie is not about blindness at all, but rather about how society would break down if such a widespread panic were to occur. The blindness is an metaphor. Quarantined groups of people, that are further divided into groups and told to ration their own food how they see fit, would probably do something along the lines of what we see in Blindness. After all, people are assholes. It's as much an indictment of the government in a post-9/11, post-Katrina world as it is one of human nature. But having watched the film, I can say that one thing it is not is a ridicule in any way of blind people. Blindness is no different than 28 Days Later or Outbreak or even The Trigger Effect, stories that test the limits of a society when it faces a real threat. "I think that failing to understand each other is a significant problem," Mauer said. "I think that portraying it as associated with blindness is just incorrect." In the words of Ron Burgundy, "Well, agree to disagree, then."

Get an Eyeful of the New 'Blindness' Posters

I've been tracking the progress of Blindness since word first broke that Fernando Meirelles would adapt the Jose Saramago novel. I think in today's movie climate, we might look at this is as somehow being similar to Children of Men or even The Happening because of the imprint the natural world makes on its citizens, and in this case, our fair city populated by the likes of Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, and Alice Braga. We like to do that: "Oh, it's just like (movie that came out four months ago)."

Of course, the novel goes back a dozen years or so, which means that if you were making that leap, you'd probably be more justified drawing a parallel between this story and, say, The Trigger Effect, about a massive west coast blackout creating havoc for a world that doesn't know how to function without electricity. The inciting occurrence in Blindness is exactly that, an unexplained pandemic of "white blindness" and all of humanity just goes nuts. That's not an unlikely effect for that cause. Julianne Moore, though, doesn't lose her sight, so without acknowledging that she can still see, she accompanies her husband, a blinded Ruffalo, to the hospital where his kind is being quarantined. Then they break out of the hospital to find that their city, as Chrissy Hynde once so poignantly said in song, was gone. So while I hope this is good and I really like the major players, it could be a lot like The Happening, I guess. Let's hope not, but there is that possibility. I think we'll see a lot of comparisons to Night Shyamalan's latest if the general reaction to Blindness was as so-so as the Cannes reaction. We do have some new posters, a day after we had the new trailer, and I just have to say, Photoshop is an amazing product. Look at the black-and-white contrast here. That's very solid.

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