In the land of the blind, Julianne Moore is queen.

Himself and I went to the opening night of the Atlantic Film Festival last night.

I was never ever ever going to go to an AFF film again after last year, but someone gave us free tickets to Blindness, which is an adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel of the same name, which I loved.

Then when we got to the Oxford St venue, we realised that AFF seem to have electronically geared themselves up, so perhaps there won't be the same bullshit about seats and queues and tickets that there was last time.

Of course, since it was opening night, we had to sit through more speeches than a GAA annual dinner. However, I particularly liked the Lt. Governor's speech, which was written of course by my friend Lori, who is now her communications advisor and speech writer. And the Chair of the Festival board made a fiery speech in defense of the arts (the federal government cut $60 million in arts funding the week before the election, which is a bit aggressive) in which she used her native Ireland as a shining example of how the arts can be nurtured even in times of chaos and war and recession.

Having spent quite a lot of the Queen Parents money studying Arts Administration and then never actually having a job in the field, that assertion of Ireland's specialness re the arts gave Queenie an opportunity for a long, quiet chuckle.

Maybe she was from the North......

Or maybe she was talking about the tax break for artist income....

Or maybe she just believed everything she read in the New York Times culture section...

I don't know.

Anyway, eventually the speeches ended and Blindness began and it was really great and all the bad reviews on IMDB were wrong.

WRONG, I say.

The producers were there and were obviously very nervous as the film bombed at the TFF.

I think it was re-edited, because they kept going on about how it was a world premiere.

Anyways, whatever they did to it, it worked.

- weird plague sweeps city/ world and everyone goes blind. Early victims are locked into a hospital/ prison type place and have to fend for themselves. Julianne Moore plays the only person who can see - the wife of an opthalmologist who has been incarcerated - she pretends she's blind to accompany him.

The result is a very powerful meditation on how a sudden crisis or change in the conditions under which humanity lives can bring out man's inherent cruelty and desire to dominate a little too quickly for most people's liking.

As Himself said on the way home, a cautionary tale.

Himself is hilarious when we watch apocalyptic movies/ read books like The Road. I get all freaked out and hope it never happens to us/ hope Himself figures out how to survive and tells me what to do. Himself always leans over at some point in the movie and whispers 'they really should get some guns right about now, eh!"

I do hope he knows where to get the afore-mentioned weapons when the end times come.

If that's the plan.

I must say, a lot of the complaints about the movie to date are stoopid, Yankee, 'moral' issues.

Yes, there's lots of random nudity.

Everyone thinks everyone else is blind. So why would one wear clothes if they're lice-infested and filthy?

There's a lot of cruelty, domination and some violence in the movie, but it's brilliantly done, nuanced rather than the bambambambambam of the latest Rambo.

The production design is fantastic. The cinematography is very intimate for most of the film, but it handles 'big city chaos' shots very well.

Julianne Moore acts her little socks off. She should get an Oscar for this role. Mark Ruffalo is pretty good as her husband too.

Fernando Mereilles makes a very good attempt at tackling Saramago's bigger themes of totalitarianism and control, particularly at the beginning of the movie, but it kind of falls off towards the end, whereas my vague memories of the book is that that claustrophobic feeling stays throughout the whole novel.

But that's Saramago for you. I read somewhere that he likes the film.

So did we.

Highly recommended.

Hilariously, after the speechifying about cultural policy, Queenie had her recurring dream again last night, after a long interval. The one where I make the speech on cultural politics to an audience of artists and they all boo.

Some day I will forgive myself for allowing myself to be scared by that day.

I was making a lot of sense.