Simply Perfect

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Let's be realistic.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

James Franco is totally cool in this movie. Not just handsome and charismatic but genuinely open and vulnerable in a sincere kind of way. At the Tristan screening some folks were on his back for being pouty and sullen and doing the whole James Dean thing but I don't think this true. Blind Spot is proof positive of his tremendous talent. In this film he carries himself with a different sort of weight entirely. It's a unique performance. Bittersweet and really moving. The lines from his journal cut you like a knife. You sense a sharp intelligence of observation behind his words. The tone is everything. He carries it through the action and suspense as well as the grim bits of gallows humor. I like the other two actors a great deal too. The blonde girl is totally gorgeous and the man is hysterical in his twisted tough guy stoicism. Some of the thugs seemed a little sketchy but this is a mini-point really. The film is totally solid and Franco is way cool all around.

It reaches the minds and feelings of everyone driving them deep in the black desert. A brutal but beautiful world that is explored through memories and edgy layers of sound and score. The landscape develops its own persona, paralleling the inner geography of all three characters as their stories unfold. The stark void of lost love, the fear of the unknown, and then transcendence of emptiness through the very openness of this desolation. Three misguided souls fighting to find something absolute and positive in all that negative space. The drama is compelling. James Franco and his co-stars deliver deft performances. Naive schoolboy, suicidal blonde, embittered car thief -- all converge with unexpected twists. Together they create an explosive portrait of fractured love -- one that unwittingly conspires to mend amidst the hardest forms of adversity and illusion -- the blindness of human emotion.

"Blind Spot" one of my festival favorites. I was totally intrigued by the idea of three strangers searching for a mysterious man who has loved and betrayed each of them in different ways. The cast is great. James Franco is particularly amazing as the broken-hearted boy from Los Angeles. His journal entries, which we hear in voice-over-narration, work well with the visuals and are quite intense. The film has a powerful style. It pushes elements like the road movie and revenge-drama in new directions. It also plays with time and perspective in ways that capture the frightening ambiance of lost love. There is a dreamlike quality to several sequences and the images are saturated with an eerie sense of tension. Strange. Suspenseful. Beautiful to look at. Definitely worth seeing. I really would like to see it again. Periodically I check to see if Blind Spot has been distributed. I can't wait to see the film again in the cinema or on DVD.Davide Pepe 13/08/2005 Bologna - Italy

I agree with the leading notes, this is a splendid film, and remarkably well balanced when one considers the side tracks that could have been taken. All the performances are fine, particularly that by James Franco as Danny, who's convincing despair at having found love and lost it so quickly (and so violently) is very moving. Apart from his good looks, he essays considerable depth of character that should take him a long way as an actor. Only the ending was somewhat frustrating. It was too rushed, as if once the shooting was over, so was the film. I had become so immersed in Danny's story a little more fleshing out would have helped, for he did go through a visceral experience and lost his first love. To have him happily turning up back at school as if nothing had happened was simply unbelievable. Nonetheless, this is an excellent and mysterious thriller. Perhaps a little too ambiguous for the huge cinema audience that has been fed on pap for so long. I hope it does well, and I sure hope it makes it to DVD as soon as possible.