The Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind is planning a protest of the Fernando Meirelles’ (“City of God”) latest film, “Blindness,” when it is released on Friday. President of the organization, Marc Maurer believes that the blindness in the movie does not act as a clever allegory for the breakdown in society, but just continues t0 perpetuate the stereotypes that have kept the blind-man down. “The movie portrays blind people as monster, and I believe it to be a lie. Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into monsters.”
The movie follows an eye doctor (Mark Ruffallo) who goes blind due to an epidemic that has caused the entire city to loose sight. Only his wife (Juillanne Moore) retains her sight and leads the quarantined patients in a revolt. What the National Federation of the Blind is all pissed about is probably the fact that the blind spend the entire movie quarantined in a mental asylum soiling themselves and trading sex for food. They believe this type of onscreen treatment will only enforce the stereotype that blind people spend their days wandering the streets of our cities trading sex for food and crapping themselves.
The movie is based off the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago, who was praised for the themes put forth in his novel. But the blind did not protested the release of the book because obviously no one but nerds read books, so there was nothing to worry about.
The movie is set to be released on Friday in 75 theaters, and if you do make it out to see it, watch out for those cannibalistic, pants soiling blind protesters. They might eat you or even worse, infect you with their blind disease.
this is a joke right?