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So I just finished watching a movie that actually made me angry it was so bad: Blindness. It’s about what happens when a large city is suddenly affected by a mass outbreak of blindness, specifically the circumstances surrounding a woman mysteriously immune to the disease and her husband in one of the quarantine centers.

Those of you familiar with my wide-ranging, eclectic, omnivorous taste in movies may be surprised to find that there are, in fact, movies I don’t like. It’s rare, but it does happen.

My main complaint about this movie is its complete lack of realism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for fantasy, science fiction, sentient grapefruits, whatever – but not in a movie that is supposed to take place in our real, contemporary world. If it’s a movie that supposed to take place in “the real world”, then the people better behave like real people or the whole thing just becomes an exercise in stupidity.

To avoid spoiling plot points, I won’t list some of the more annoying examples until the end of the post (after the “Read on …” break). For now, suffice to say – many of the reactions of both individuals and the government / military are just stupid, and ridiculously contrived to fit the plot rather than to make any sense.

That right there was enough to destroy the entire film for me. I barely cared about any of the characters because they didn’t register as ‘real’ people, just actors going through their badly-written motions.

The reason this made me angry is because the premise of the film is awesome, could have really explored some interesting, thought provoking stuff. Instead it used that premise to shoehorn in nonsensical scenes and belabor obvious points.

Grr.

Giving this one a score of 4 out of 10. It would have been lower, but there were glimpses here and there of much better material hidden beneath the tripe.

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I was chatting with a friend of mine about movies the other day, specifically about formats: “letterbox” vs. “pan & scan”. It reminded me of something I posted waaay back on the subject, when TheMook.Net still smelled like a new baby, so I dug it up. It was originally posted on May 21, 1999, on my “Soapbox” page:

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“Okay, I know that this rant isn’t exactly a burning world issue, or a hot topic of today’s society…but hell, it’s important to me and this is my soapbox…

Lately I’ve been absolutely swamped with people decrying me as some sort of movie heretic, for the unpardonable crime of…preferring to watch videotapes that are in Letterbox format over the usual “pan & scan” crap.

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