The upcoming film “Blindness” from Miramax, in theaters this Friday October 3rd, is triggering a growing wave of protest at the depictions of blind people in the movie.
Marc Maurer, the president of the National Federation of the Blind, based out of Baltimore MD, told the Associated Press “[t]he movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie, […] Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into monsters.” Maurer says he plans to organize protests against the film on its opening day.
“Blindness”, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, and Gael GarcÃa Bernal, is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by José de Sousa Saramago, about an epidemic of blindness that hits the world and how it affects the world and our characters, including Julianne Moore’s character, who is secretly hiding that she can still see. Society descends into chaos and anarchy as the blindness plague spreads.
Some are drawing comparisons to the similar furor over the use of “retarded” and an on-screen depiction in the summer blockbuster “Tropic Thunder” by director and star Ben Stiller. The character in “Tropic Thunder” is an actor whose previous work includes a role as a mentally-challenged young man in a movie called “Simple Jack”, which protests called offensive.
“Blindness”‘s director Fernando Meirelles spoke out at the Cannes Film Festival about the film, stating it was a commentary on the human condition and on the state of social collapses after disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
Stay tuned to Toxic Shock TV for more on “Blindness” and other movies.
By Costa Koutsoutis, (Source: Wired.com)