Blind Dating DVD Review
Posted by Ryan Byers on 03.14.2008
How horrible of a human being would I be if I criticized this movie for lacking vision? I guess no worse than the people who came up with the pun in the title . . .
After doing work as a writer and a director, James Keach gained some momentum in the wacky world of show business thanks to his work as a producer on the very well-received Walk the Line. His follow-up was a directorial credit, which came in the form of 2006's Blind Dating. That movie just recently received its DVD release, and that release is why we're here today.
The film is a romantic comedy focusing on the love life of young Danny, who is, in fact, blind. (Yes, this makes the title a bit lame, but fortunately the movie realizes that fact and takes a self-referential jab at it.) Danny, in part due to his disability, has never had a satisfactory relationship, though he's the sort of guy who, upon realizing this, is going to take action. He receives help from his older brother Larry, who conveniently owns a limo service and knows half of the women in town. This results in Danny going on a series of dates with various young ladies, none of whom know exactly how to deal with the fact that he can't see. This isn't just a series of simple misunderstandings, though. Somehow Larry has managed to set his sibling up with five or six of the least socially competent females on the planet, resulting in each supposedly romantic rendezvous ending in a manner most tragic and most embarrassing for all parties involved. I personally would have given up on taking Larry's advice about halfway through the movie, but apparently I do not truly know the pain of being a twenty-five year old who has never so much as kissed a woman.
Fortunately, there is a bright spot or two in Danny's love life throughout the course of the film. In the midst of his "blind dating" escapades, he is also a candidate for an experimental procedure which may allow him to develop some limited vision. The experiment itself winds up being a bit of a bust, but it is through his regular trips to the surgeon that he meets Leeza, an Indian woman with whom he becomes enraptured. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding between Leeza and Danny as it relates to the former's arranged marriage (Do those really still occur?) results in the couple bickering about halfway through the movie, leaving the audience with the impression that they may never fully realize their love for each other. Correction: It would leave the audience with that impression if the audience was comprised entirely of people who had managed to live their whole lives without watching a romantic comedy the whole way through. Naturally, at the end of the day, the two crazy kids do manage to overcome the roadblocks placed in front of their relationship, and everybody goes home happy.
Though that part of the film may be a little trite, I don't mean for my criticisms to leave readers with the impression that there is nothing worthwhile about this particular picture. To the contrary, there's a lot to like. The casting and the acting were both phenomenal, with almost every performer seemingly being well-suited for his or her role and doing a fine job of making their characters believable. The supporting actors are gold, with perpetual bit player Frank Gerrish doing a fine job as Danny and Larry's father and director Keach's former Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman coworker Jane Seymour getting a hilarious run as Danny's exhibitionist therapist. It's our leading couple that really makes the movie in to something worth taking a lok at, though. Chris Pine (recently cast as the young James T. Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek movie) does a superb job with the Danny character. It would have been very easy to make him in to an individual who feels to sorry for himself or the sort of arrogant jerk who refuses to recognize any of his limitations. However, Pine managed to hit the middle ground just perfectly, portraying Danny as a perfectly normal man of his age who just happens to have one limitation on how he perceives the world. Also impressive is relative newcomer to cinema Anjali Jay, who does some fine work in turning Leeza from the generic vision of beauty that inhabits these movies to real, three-dimensional woman who audiences can identify with beyond her being the object of the protagonist's desires.
Unfortunately, the structure of the film does a disservice to these performances. There seems to be a real tension between the scenes involving Danny's dates and the scenes involving his interaction with Leeza. The former group comes off as a traditional romantic comedy. The second group, though worthy of a chuckle or two, comes off as a series of skits that somebody thought would make a great sitcom until they realized that the premise would get tired halfway through the first season. It's as though the movie has multiple personality disorder, being unable to decide whether it primarily wants to be the first movie described or the second. By the time that I started getting in to the burgeoning romance between the two leads, it was time to switch back to wacky comedy, and by the time that the comedy started to get funny, we went right back in to the traditional love story. If one portion of the film had just five or ten minutes shaved off of it and the sequence of the scenes was slightly shuffled, the picture could have been significantly better than it wound up being.
Special Features
Theatrical Trailer: I think we all know what a trailer is, and I think we're all well aware that the presence of one on a DVD has never added any sort of value to owning the disc.
Behind the Scenes of Blind Dating: In the event that you're an exception to the above line and you DO love watching trailers, this is the feature for you. Why? Because, in order to create this "behind the scenes" featurette, the powers that be took the trailer and chopped it up, interlacing roughly four minutes of interview footage with various actors in between the featured scenes.
Deleted Scenes: As is the case with the majority of DVD deleted scenes, I can see perfectly valid reasons for these being dropped from the final version of the film. There are a couple of instances in which the extra clips shown here do help to flesh out some supporting characters (particularly Danny's little sister), but including them would have hurt the pace and flow of the film to the point that the negatives of using the footage would have far outweighed the positives.
The 411: Blind Dating isn't bad. It isn't phenomenal, but it isn't bad. I certainly wouldn't have recommended seeing it in the theaters, nor do I think that it's worth the price of purchasing the DVD. (Nor is it something that I really need to own for posterity's sake.) However, if you're a young man looking for a date movie but don't want to put up with the traditional "chick flick," it might be worth a rental. It certainly won't be your favorite film of all time, but it contains just enough serious romance that people who are looking for that sort of thing will be entertained for ninety minutes and just enough comedy that people who are looking for that sort of thing will be entertained for ninety minutes. Had the picture chosen one direction or the other, it could have been a highlight of its genre. Unfortunately, it chose neither, resulting in nothing particularly outstanding.
