UPDATE: Here's the trailer in Quicktime quality.

Of all the films I'm looking forward to this fall, Blindness ranks fairly high up there. Canadian distributor Alliance has just made available a full trailer that proves to be fairly intriguing, as an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his seemingly immune wife (Julianne Moore) cope with an inexplicable epidemic of sight loss.

I'm a sucker for most anything vaguely apocalyptic, and while this very well could turn out to be akin to watching the first act of Children of Men through a milk-filled mask (which I've done, mind you), the prestige behind the project* says otherwise. We have acclaimed screenwriter Don McKellar adapting Nobel-Laureate José Saramago's novel, with Academy Award nominee Fernando Meirelles directing a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, and Sandra Oh.

I must say, going off that taste and last spring's teaser, I still like the look, sound, and feel of this one, especially Moore's little retort (you know the one), and that's not to mention that any trailer which employs John Murphy's underrated score from last year's Sunshine to set a rightfully ominous tone is always fine by me. We'll get to see (sorry) what trials and tribulations await the world on September 19th.

*Not to mention Rocchi's review of the film from its Cannes world premiere.

Another Brazilian filmmaker leaves the favelas behind and moves to Hollywood: The Hollywood Reporter reports that acclaimed yet controversial writer-director José Padilha will make an action movie, appropriately set in South America, for Warner Bros. Hardly a stranger to the genre, Padilha recently picked up the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for his critically divisive Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a semi-fictional action thriller about police corruption in Rio de Janeiro. Our own Scott Weinberg, reviewing from Tribeca, called the film "powerfully gritty, slyly engrossing and unapologetically brutal." Prior to that film, Padilha made the brilliantly kinetic documentary Bus 174, which was one of my favorite releases of 2003.

The new project is currently without a name, but the original title was A Willing Patriot. Scripted by Jason Keller (who wrote the 2002 fX TV-movie Big Shot: Confessions of a Campus Bookie), the movie will be about an American federal agent who goes undercover in South America's "Triple Frontier" (the dangerous tri-border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay) to break up a terrorist-funding network. Producer Gianni Nunnari (The Departed, 300), who did the hiring of Padilha, apparently referred to the film's setting as "a modern-day Dodge City." The next step for Nunnari and fellow producers Darin Friedman and Guymon Casady (The Final Cut) is to cast a major Hollywood actor and a major Latino actor.

I sat in on a roundtable luncheon for the film Blindness the other day; as far as roundtables go, it was a nice affair; there were four tables of journalists, and they rotated the talent through the tables, giving us about 15 minutes with each set. It's always interesting to me to talk to the actors and filmmaker about a film like this; it gives you a different perspective that you have from just watching the film.

A word of caution: There are spoilers in these interviews about certain aspects of the film, but I'm including them because they provide a good deal of context about the film and the motivations of the characters. If you prefer to go into seeing the film blind, as it were, you'll not want to read this until after you've seen it. If you do want to learn more about the film, the interview writeup is after the jump ...

This morning James and I and a couple thousand other press folks took in a screening of the Opening Film at Cannes 2008, Fernando Meirelles's Blindness, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal. You can check out James' review here, and tomorrow I'll be attending a luncheon/roundtable for the film. And in related Cannes news, Jack Black arrived at the 2008 Festival de Cannes in style. He's here to promote Kung Fu Panda, which premieres later in the week. Check out our gallery of Black and tons of panda bears down below.

Meantime, though, my take on Blindness is that it's ambitious and good, but falls short of being great. In part, I think, this is because the source material was challenging to adapt to a visual experience, but it's also due to some clunky expositional voiceover that detracts from the experience more than it adds. I don't want to be told how this or that person feels or reacts, I want to see it.

Fernando Meirelles's new film Blindness begins with the rush and push of urban life; traffic, crowds, activity, purpose. And then, one man cries out: "I'm blind." He eventually makes it to an ophthalmologist, but there's nothing physically wrong with his eyes; he simply can't see. "It feels like I'm swimming in milk," he explains, and we see, through his eyes, the blank, empty swirl of what used to be the world. And then another person says they are blind, and then another, and soon those few, frightened voices form a chorus of chaos as "the White Sickness" spreads like wildfire and leaves a ruined world in its wake.

Adapting Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago's novel, Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction; as the White Sickness spreads from person to person in a clear chain of connection and things fall apart, it'd be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students. Meirreles has taken a similar two-pronged approach before -- The Constant Gardener is an excellent critique of the failings of modern capitalism that also works as a strong, suspenseful thriller -- and while Blindness may not work as well as that film, it's also a clear case of a film, and filmmaker, failing to hit the mark occasionally only because they've set the bar so high for themselves.

We thought this looked awesome last summer, and now we have some confirmation. MSN has posted a teaser trailer for Blindness, Fernando Meirelles' apocalyptic thriller based on the novel by José Saramago, and it creeps me out. The movie is about a blindness epidemic that sweeps through a city, afflicting everyone except one woman (Julianne Moore) who is apparently immune. She's then forced to feign blindness (Why? If no one else can see, what's the difference?) to care for her husband (Mark Ruffalo) as everything around them goes to hell. The tonal shift at the beginning of the teaser is genuinely startling, maybe because the upbeat music doesn't stop playing as you'd expect, or maybe because it deals with something that is one of this cinephile's worst nightmares.

I like Meirelles' City of God as much as the next guy, but the real reason I'm excited for this is that the screenplay is written by Don McKellar, whose previous stab at depicting the end of the world, Last Night, is one of my favorite films (with one of the most perfect endings of all time). Blindness is expected to play the Toronto Film Festival this September, with a US release slated for October. Can anyone who's read the book give us some (non-spoiler) hints of what to expect?

[hat tip: comingsoon.net]

At this point, I will watch any film that takes place in the Brazilian favelas, as long as Fernando Meirelles is involved. And I imagine that a lot of my peers would feel the same, if they would only see his latest, City of Men. After all, this is the man who in 2002 gave us City of God, which I've determined to be the second most popular contemporary foreign-language film for people of my generation (Amelie being the first). The film also thrust Meirelles into international acclaim and success, including an Oscar-nomination for Best Director, yet it wasn't his first time presenting a riveting story set in the Rio shantytowns.

In 2000, Meirelles and his City of God co-director, Kátia Lund, made a short film titled Palace II. It was something of a precursor to (and apparently a test-run for) City of God, and it was based on an excerpt from the same source novel, written by Paulo Lins. But narratively, it has nothing to do with the subsequent feature film. Palace II is actually set in the present -- City of God takes place in the '80s -- and follows two young friends, Wallace (nickname: "Laranjinha") and Luis Claudio (nickname: "Acerola"), who live in poverty in the favela.

It's official, Mark Ruffalo will pretend to be a doctor with no sight in the upcoming film Blindness. See, he doesn't start out with no sight but is struck with the devastating ailment during the film -- actually, that's what the flick is about. Ruffalo takes over for Daniel Craig who dropped out of the project due to scheduling conflicts. Blindness is based on the novel by Jose Saramago, and revolves around a town that erupts with a blinding epidemic. Everyone is affected except Ruffalo's wife, played by the oh-so-wonderful Julianne Moore (someone please hand her an Oscar!)

Ruffalo's senses are far from taking a break anytime soon. He's been working non-stop since Zodiac (probably before that even) and will begin filming Blindness in Brazil following the three films he just wrapped. He is currently working with the likes of Terry George and Spike Jonze. Blindness will be directed by Fernando Meirelles who is responsible for 2005's Constant Gardner and the sad but beautiful film about Brazilian street gangs City of God. With the stellar cast and more than able director you would have to be blind not to see something good in the making.

Considering his new three-year production deal over at Universal/Focus, Fernando Meirelles still hasn't been linked to any projects associated with that studio. His next film, Blindness, which will be adapted by Don McKellar from the novel by José Saramago, is so far not set up with any distributor (as far as I can tell), and now the sequel to his breakout hit City of God (co-directed by Kátia Lund), which he did not direct but produced, has just been picked up by Miramax. This latter deal is not that surprising since Miramax also distributed the original, but it would not have been impossible to get the follow-up going at Focus.

The sequel, titled City of Men, which is also the name of the television series spun-off from the first film, was directed by Paulo Morelli and is currently in post-production. From the synopsis that I've seen, it basically looks like either a continuation or remake of the show, as it follows its main characters, Laranjinha (Darlan Cunha) and Acerola (Douglas Silva), both of whom were also the focus of Meirelles' and Lund's short film Golden Gate (Palace II).

So for those doing the math, it seems that City of Men is actually based on a show that was based on a feature film that was based on a short film. Except, maybe we should actually eliminate the feature film part of that equation. Since Cunha and Silva (and other actors from the show) didn't play the same characters in City of God, that film has nothing to do with the rest of these things, and is possibly only related for marketing purposes.

Fernando Meirelles' City of God was so phenomenal that when the director's follow-up, The Constant Gardener, was released, I hated it simply because it just didn't compare. Well, I've since gotten over my initial disappointment with Gardener and have even developed a love for it -- still not as big as my love for City of God, however -- and so I continue to look forward to whatever Meirelles gives us in the future. Turns out, he may be giving us more than we could have imagined, thanks to a new three-year, five-picture deal with Universal/Focus. The deal isn't for films that Meirelles will direct himself, but is instead for the development of films by young Brazilian filmmakers.

This is incredible news considering most of the time Hollywood wants to remake foreign films, not produce them. Sure indie divisions like Universal's Focus Features pick them up for distribution, and Brazil is often represented in America thanks to the great actress Fernanda Monenegro, but in my opinion, we can never have too many foreign films released in this country. The one Brazilian film that Meirelles produced before this deal, Contra Todos, wasn't given a proper release in the States, which is too bad, because I'd bet it's far better than that awful film that won the best foreign language Oscar this year.