• Genre: Drama, Suspense/Thriller
  • Release Date: 10/03/2008
  • Running Time: 118 mins
  • Director: Fernando Meirelles
  • Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Sandra Oh, Gael García Bernal, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Maury Chaykin, Don McKellar, Martha Burns, Michael Mahonen
  • Producer: Niv Fichman, Andrea Barata Ribeiro, Sonoko Sakai
  • Writer: José Saramago, Don McKellar
  • Distributor: Miramax
  • Offical Site: Click Here
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Box Office

  1. The Dark Knight, 26.1 million, 441.6 million
  2. Twilight, 69.6 million, 69.6 million
  3. Quantum of Solace, 26.7 million, 108.8 million
  4. Pineapple Express, 23.2 million, 41.3 million
  5. Bolt, 26.2 million, 26.2 million
  6. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, 16.5 million, 71.0 million
  7. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, 15.7 million, 137.1 million
  8. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, 10.7 million, 19.6 million
  9. Role Models, 7.3 million, 48.1 million
  10. Step Brothers, 9.1 million, 81.1 million
  11. Changeling, 2.7 million, 31.7 million
  12. Mamma Mia!, 8.2 million, 104.1 million
  13. High School Musical 3: Senior Year, 2.0 million, 86.9 million
  14. Journey to the Center of the Earth, 4.9 million, 81.8 million
  15. Hancock, 3.3 million, 221.7 million
  16. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 1.6 million, 2.6 million
  17. WALL-E, 3.1 million, 210.2 million
  18. Zack and Miri, 1.6 million, 29.3 million
  19. Swing Vote, 3.1 million, 12.0 million
  20. The Secret Life of Bees, 1.3 million, 35.6 million
Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Blindness

The most recent example of bleak chic, Fernando Meirelles’s mostly harrowing adaptation of José Saramago’s international bestseller Blindness is unflinching at best and treacly at worst. The film, like the novel, opens with a man (Yusuke Iseya) in a car stopped at a traffic light who suddenly loses his vision. Another man (screenwriter Don McKellar), who drives him home and later steals his car, also falls prey to the mysterious “white blindness,” as does the first victim’s doctor (Mark Ruffalo). Soon, the entire human population finds itself engulfed in a milky sightlessness save, inexplicably, one: the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore). Meirelles, working with his Brazilian cinematographer, César Charlone, establishes the plague’s outbreak with visual flair, evoking the experience of the ivory blindness through blurry and brightly overexposed frames. Like Saramago, Meirelles doesn’t much care about the medical or psychological specifics of blindness, nor is he interested in the fate of any one human, but rather humanity as a whole. (There’s obviously a grand metaphor here—people are “blind”—but it’s pretty simplistic.) Blindness is strongest when it’s not trying to say anything, but instead conveying the sheer desperation of its characters. The film pulls the viewer into its nightmarish vision and dares us to watch how humankind—at the level of both governments and individuals—fails to cope in times of chaos. And considering the current headlines, maybe that’s insightful enough. — Anthony Kaufman