Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Appaloosa
Directed by Ed Harris
C+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Oct. 3

To answer the big question: No, Ed Harris doesn't do for the Western what he did for the biopic with Pollock. Of course, the Western is an infinitely more reputable genre than the sorry biopic, and in short supply. Moreover it's a genre that tolerates, even embraces, the kind of longueur Harris thrives on.

But with Appaloosa--no relation to the 1966 Marlon Brando vehicle The Appaloosa--it often seems as though Harris' primary motivation was to make the sleepiest film on record, albeit one with a corker of a setup.

Evil rancher Jeremy Irons whimsically guns down the sheriff of a small New Mexican town and solidifies his role as town menace. Lawmen-for-hire Harris and Viggo Mortensen are engaged to show him and his men no mercy and generally mess things up. But when they arrest Irons so he can stand trial, they quickly realize they may have bitten off more than they can chew.

The book Appaloosa, by Robert B. Parker, might be a page-turner. But Harris seems to think he's directing an anti-Western on the order of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He's not. Appaloosa should be a Western-Western, the kind that would've been directed by Robert Aldrich or Anthony Mann if it were made a half-century ago.

Appaloosa is snail-paced--you often half expect a tumbleweed to drift by--and frankly just isn't interesting enough to be this sluggish. Clint Eastwood can get away with this tactic because his films grapple ceaselessly with heady ideas of death, guilt and honor. (And because his films are often beauts, whereas Appaloosa is just below functional.) Such ideas permeate Harris' film, but in forced, clumsy fashion; Harris seems to think himself a master.

Appaloosa's obtuseness makes it perversely likable, as does the chemistry between Harris and Mortensen. Self-effacing and impossibly distant, respectively, their downtime hangout scenes have a worn-in, jokey quality that almost makes you wish there wasn't a plot to get to. And it's impossible to hate on any Western in which, after a near-fatal mass shoot-out, one character laments, "Everybody could shoot."

Blindness
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
D+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Oct. 3

Kudos to Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. He's made the most visually annoying movie since Transformers. Granted, that's partly intentional. In his latest film, Blindness--based on Jos� Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning novel--a city suffers an epidemic that leaves all the victims without sight.

On the page one doesn't need to dwell much on conveying their sensory loss. But Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) grapples with it almost exclusively, bombarding the viewer with images that are next to impossible to parse. No trick is too crass. Every shot is out of focus, too close in, too far away, too dark, too bright, shot through reflective surfaces or some impenetrable mixture of the aforementioned.

It's clear Meirelles focused on image when he should've paid some attention to the content. If he had, he might've noticed how stupid it all is.

Julianne Moore headlines an international cast as the wife of an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) who--irony alert!--is one of the first to inexplicably go blind. As scientists race to diagnose the problem, the affected are quarantined in a compound that very quickly resembles New Orleans' Superdome, with a totalitarian government and trigger-happy guards.

But why? Maybe the book bothers with an explanation beyond superficial pessimism. Perhaps the source also explains why Moore's character, who isn't affected but pretends to be so as not to be separated from Ruffalo, lets the compound's resident fascist (Gael Garc�a Bernal) take over the ward and demand payment and poontang for food when she has the leg up, sense-wise.

Blind advocates have expressed horror at the film's treatment of sightlessness. While Blindness is, bizarrely, not above Mr. Magoo-style yuks, its subject isn't vision impairment but the Lord of the Flies-style baseness of humanity, and at that it's risibly unconvincing. Meirelles directs his actors to act chaotically, and though that's better than Oscar-baiting, the film feels like an actor's workshop where they "find" the film, only they never do. Blindness doesn't even have a stupid gotcha twist ending--it barely has an ending at all, and no clear reason for being. It's lost in a fog.