Vancouver International Film Festival 2008

Brazil

Plastic City

Review by gloria wong

Plastic City begins rather promisingly as an international action/thriller set in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Yuda works the local politicians to secure his blackmarket import/export business interests. He is also the adoptive father of his next-in-command Kirin, a young man with a taste for Brazilian strippers and anime-inspired violence. When Taiwanese representatives of a more powerful crime syndicate show up and convince the local crooked cops and more powerful crooked politicians to turn on Yuda and his small gang, it seems like the perfect setup for intrigue.

Unfortunately, the film devolves into a genre mish-mash with a few too many endings. Twists and genre-blending are one thing; meandering from dead-end to dead-end is an entirely different thing.

Plastic City
Yu Lik-wai | Brazil/China | 2008 | 115min

Brazil

Blindness

Review by Chris Walts

Blindness is best described less as a film, and more as a perverse examination of what would happen to humanity if blindness suddenly became an infectious disease. Adapted from José Saramago's novel by Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener), Blindness is set in an unnamed city in present day, where everyone who becomes infected with blindness gets quarantined to a rundown sanitarium, and left to fend for themselves.

Under the pretense that Blindness is more an of examination than a film, it does an excellent job of making the audience empathize with the blind, while also forcing us to question our moral grounding. Julianne Moore turns in a great performance that is well supported by a large ensemble casting including Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, and Don McKellar. The film on the whole however, starts slowly and ends abruptly without pushing its moral tightrope to its full potential. The large ensemble cast also is problematic at times as there are simply too many stories going at once to for one to absorb all the atrocities of the situation. That being said, the heart of the film and the sometimes-gruesome questions it raises are strong enough to overcome its structural flaws.

Blindness
Fernando Meirelles | Canada/Brazil/Japan | 2008 | 118min

Thur. Sept. 25 | 7:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre 7
Sat. Sept. 27 | 10:30am | Empire Granville Theatre 2