Film Friday: Nick and Norah's Blindness

There are a lot of films out this week, and a lot of them played at TIFF. In fact, we caught a few of them at TIFF after their public screenings, so let's take a break from our usual format and give them proper capsule reviews!

Blindness (Fernando Mereilles) – It was written by local legend Don McKellar, so we had high hopes for this adaptation of José Saramago's novel, particularly as we've enjoyed his other "apocalyptic" works such as Last Night. The strange thing is that the weakness inherent in this film—a sort of "what if" about a sudden epidemic of blindness—is completely in its structure. It's shot well, and the performances are all very strong, but the time spent as an intense look at the social effects of placing a large group of newly blind people into an asylum (without enough food or resources) is wasted by the third act turn where our group of "heroes" wander the streets and blind people are portrayed with less respect than zombies normally are in a George Romero film. The conclusion, frankly, undoes all of the pathos of the mid-section; no matter how modified this film was from its failed Cannes screening, it's still deeply flawed. 2/5

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett) – We wish we had nicer, or even nastier, things to say about this film. Unlike last year's Juno, this isn't abrasive or even interesting enough to cause any real emotions—it's as mild as the average rom-com, just in a different context. Michael Cera plays his usual awkward dude (we're pretty worried about his ability to pull off Scott Pilgrim now) and Kat Dennings is cute as the girl he rebounds with, but the structure—ex-boy- and girlfriends that are so evil that we wonder why they would ever have went out with them in the first place, the "wacky" friends, misadventures around town—is moribund. It's nice, we guess, that it portrays a New York we're more familiar with than, say, a Woody Allen film, but probably the most interesting thing about the film is what it says about the MPAA: according to what we've heard, they would have had to cut Norah's (off-screen) climax unless they made it part of the plot (the lazy "she doesn't know if she has had/can have one"). The result is utterly bizarre and ruins what would be one of the film's moments of true loveliness with unnecessary meaning. Oh well. 2/5

Also on release this week, Rachel Getting Married, Flash of Genius, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, The Secret of the Grain, Religulous, RocknRolla, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

In film festivals, there's the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival (one of our favourites, actually, and it snuck up on us this year) beginning on Tuesday, but probably the most interesting screening of the week is tomorrow, when the Secret Policeman's Ball 2008—a comedy benefit show for Amnesty International, including performances from comedians including Eddie Izzard, Kristen Schaal, and Matt Berry—plays a variety of local cinemas, such as the Scotiabank Theatre, live at 2:00 p.m..