Short Takes

BATTLE IN SEATTLE Written and directed by actor Stuart Townsend, Battle in Seattle reanimates the recent past—namely the late-1999 street actions that, as the largest organized protest of the Clinton era, successfully shut down the World Trade Organization's "Millennium" round of negotiations. While the rest of the developed world quaked in fear of the dreaded Y2K "virus," tens of thousands of costumed demonstrators danced in the streets of downtown Seattle. Billed the "Battle in Seattle" before it even happened, this was the first Internet protest in history, as someone explains in the movie with reference to the demonstrators' uncanny ability to coordinate blockage of the city's pressure points. For his part, Townsend is rather more labored in orchestrating the ensemble. His protagonists are taken from all sides of the event, including glamorous demonstrators of various persuasions (notably OutKast's André Benjamin), a police officer (Woody Harrelson) and his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron), a feisty TV-news reporter (Connie Nielsen), and Seattle's beleaguered mayor (Ray Liotta). Their intentions, like Townsend's, are mostly good, but Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed to achieve pure tabloid hysteria. In that sense, it's true to the actual event. The impression the movie leaves is less what the French activist Yves Frémion termed an "orgasm of history" than a hiccup. The world held its breath and moved on. —J. Hoberman (Opens Friday at The Belcourt; the 7 p.m. show Friday is sold out, and the 12:30 p.m. screening Sunday, Oct. 5, will be introduced by Vanderbilt associate professor of political science Brooke A. Ackerly, author of Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference.)

BLINDNESS Fernando Meirelles' future-is-now nightmare, in which a nameless contagion robs humankind of its sight and reverses civilization toward Stone Age savagery, is scary, engrossing and credible in its physical details: The opening, in which a motorist blanks out mid-traffic and must rely on a shifty Samaritan (screenwriter Don McKellar), throws us off-balance visually as well as empathetically. Shots fuzz in and out of focus, compositions destabilize so that we lose our bearings, and a solar glare turns objects and faces into soupy silhouettes. (A character describes the sensation as "swimming in milk.") Once the plot narrows to a concentration camp where the newly blind are quarantined, the movie congeals into dully literal-minded allegory: In this land of the blind, still-sighted Julianne Moore (protecting her stricken doctor husband Mark Ruffalo) becomes king until despotic creep Gael Garcia Bernal asserts himself and his sightless rogues as rapist/rulers. Adapting Jose Saramago's novel, City of God director Meirelles attempts to visualize the unseeable and often pulls it off, though his visual effects get hammier as the brutalities escalate. More memorable than the camera tricks are the moments that evoke the everyday hazards of this dark new world—as when Moore attempts to fetch supplies from a ransacked grocery, only to attract blind looters like zombies with the smell of meat. Anyone who lined up to hoard gas last week will feel the chill. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)