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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS

THE BLIND MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC


by Justin Tanner

 

And the award for best movie title of the year goes to... Director Teemu Nikki’s equal parts charming and terrifying 82-minute “The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic.”

First of all, how happy are we about the short running time?

After 2022’s excessive cinematic bloat, with dozens of films clocking in at two and a half hours plus, it’s been a huge relief to come across a spate of recent titles that wrap it up right around the 90-minute mark. “The Novelist’s Film”, “Full Time”, “Punch”, “Of An Age”, and “Lonesome” all got me back to my car and out of the parking lot before “Babylon” reached its halfway point.

Then there’s that title which I already deeply connected with even prior to seeing the film. After all, I’m a fully sighted person who wished with all my heart I had not seen James Cameron’s grotesquely earthbound Hallmark Channel turd, with its cheesy CGI, laughably lame dialog and headache-inducing pennywhistle soundtrack.

Petri Poikolainen — making his feature film debut — portrays Jaakko, the titular “man,” a movie buff with a vast DVD collection and a taste for John Carpenter films.


Image Courtesy of Fandor

Blind, paralyzed from the chest up and confined to a wheelchair, Jaakko — a former runner — spends his days in a claustrophobic apartment, his routine consisting of playing the lottery, avoiding his dad’s phone calls, smoking pot and overhearing his horrible neighbors call him a junkie and blame him for the MS that led to his current physical state.

And then there’s Sirpa (the sweetly acerbic Marjaana Maijala), a woman he’s never met in person but with whom he shares a deeply romantic telephone relationship.

Their sexy flirtatious conversations, mostly about the movies, are intellectual at times, at times just goofy and intentionally stupid: in an endearing riff about cinematic canines, Jaakko explains that Lassie is “an Americana Jesus dog with a mullet.”

One day Jaakko gets a life changing phone call that propels him from the safety — and boredom — of his hermitically sealed apartment, and out into the world at large. This journey to finally meet his lady love face to face takes up the remainder of the film, and involves his quest to find “five kind people” to assist him.


Image Courtesy of Fandor

Of course the trip doesn’t go as planned and before long his metaphoric ocean voyage runs headlong into its own terrifying iceberg. From here, the film eerily transitions from rom-com to thriller, creating a “Wait Until Dark” level of heart-pounding suspense.

What makes “The Blind Man...” such a remarkable achievement are two indelible elements:

Director Nikki’s innovative camera technique — which centers his hero in the middle of the frame while blurring nearly everything else around him — puts us deep inside the at times terrifying experience of the unseeing Jaakko.

Not since Julian Schnabel’s brilliant 2007 biopic “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has a director more successfully used the language of cinema to immerse the audience in the first person, altered state of someone experiencing visual and physical impairment. It’s a monumentally absorbing film.

But none of this would work without Poikolainen’s astoundingly resonant performance.


Image Courtesy of Fandor

We spend 95% of the movie with only his expressive, handsome face as our companion — but what a face! Every nuance of his heartbreaking emotional odyssey is delivered with subtle richness and finesse.

It’s still early in 2023 but I would easily place Petri Poikolainen’s stunning work here at the very top of my list of the year’s great achievements in acting.

At turns sweet, romantic, scary, exhilarating and ultimately mind-expanding, “The Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic” is an absolute must-see film.

And at 82 minutes long, there’s no reason not to rent it this weekend.

STREAMING ON VUDU

 

 

An LA-based playwright, JUSTIN TANNER has more than twenty produced plays to his credit, including Voice Lessons, Day Drinkers, Space Therapy, Wife Swappers, and Coyote Woman. His Pot Mom received the PEN-West Award for Best Play.

He has written for the TV shows Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life and the short-lived Love Monkey. He wrote, directed and edited 88 episodes of the web series Ave 43, available on YouTube.

Tanner is the current Playwright in Residence for the Rogue Machine Theatre in Hollywood, where his new play Little Theatre, of December of 2022, was met with rave reviews. Charles McNulty of the LA Times writes, "Engrossing... a comedy à clef... “Little Theatre” is invaluable.'"

 

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Gordy Grundy

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