Blindsided (2006)

Unlike the similarly titled The Blind Side starring Sandra Bullock, Blindsided is a documentary film full of ophthalmology content.  This 65 minute documentary chronicles 12 year-old Jared Hara's experience with a particularly cruel disease known as Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, a rare form of vision loss which typically develops in a person's teens or twenties.  From the National Institutes of Health:

These vision problems may begin in one eye or simultaneously in both eyes; if vision loss starts in one eye, the other eye is usually affected within several weeks or months. Over time, vision in both eyes worsens with a severe loss of sharpness (visual acuity) and color vision. This condition mainly affects central vision, which is needed for detailed tasks such as reading, driving, and recognizing faces. Vision loss results from the death of cells in the nerve that relays visual information from the eyes to the brain (the optic nerve). Although central vision gradually improves in a small percentage of cases, in most cases the vision loss is profound and permanent.

In the movie, we see Jared's ophthalmologists,  re-enactments of his exams, and witness his personal struggles with his progressive disorder.  The movie's strength lies in its rendering of how disease affects not only the individual, but also their family and friends.  Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy's basis on mutations in maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA also elicits complex feelings of guilt, blame, and unpredictability within the family.

In many ways, Blindsided (and movies like it) should be required viewing for  medical students.  Not every doctor (or even ophthalmologist) will encounter Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy in their career.  These personalized accounts of illness bring textbook descriptions alive, making obscure and intangible diseases very real.  And of course, feelings of helplessness and desperation in the patient and their family when dealing with medical conditions are something important for every practitioner to remember, even when rushing from one exam room to the next.


Blindsided won Best Documentary at the Idaho International Film Festival in 2006.  It has been showing lately on HBO, and is available on DVD.  As a movie, it relies heavily on Ken Burns-style pan and zooming, with an occasionally distracting soundtrack and some awkward sequence editing.  None of this takes too much away from the power of the story, and its illuminating portrayal of a tenacious victim of optic neuropathy.  Compared to that cloying Sandra Bullock football movie, Blindsided has a hell of a lot more ophthalmology content, and a far more nuanced representation of family dynamics and heroism.  B  .

Hachi: A Dog's Story (2009)

The famous true story of Hachiko, the loyal Japanese dog who awaited his master's return every day at the Shibuya train station, gets a modern makeover starring Richard Gere and Joan Allen.  Sony Pictures Entertainment booted this movie straight to a DVD release (just like the last movie re-make I reviewed, Ice Castles), so you'd expect that it would be pretty bad.  But after watching this one, I was surprised it never got a proper theatrical release.

Is there some rule that dog-centric movies must culminate in ultimate sadness?  Entertainment Weekly's review cites Marley and Me and I Am Legend  as recent examples of this man-dog bond motif.  Gere plays a music professor who stumbles upon the lost puppy, Hachi.  The movie bounces between scenes at the university, the professor's home, and the community of merchants around the commuter train station.  I'll try not to give away anything from this story based on events from the 1920s. but you can bet every effort to squeeze tears from the viewer is exhausted here.

The ophthalmology content involves scenes from Hachi's point of view, and show obvious color perception derangement.  This begs the question: Are dogs really color-blind?  My research took me to Paul Miller's (from University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Veterinary Medicine) excellent review article Vision in Dogs.  Some selected excerpts:

Color vision in domestic mammals has been the subject of numerous studies with conflicting results.  More recent, well-controlled studies suggest that most domestic mammals possess, and use, color vision... cones constitute less than 10% of the visual streak in the dog, whereas they occupy almost 100% of the human fovea.  Additionally, instead of the three types of cones found in humans with normal color vision, dogs have only two functional cone types.

The article goes on to state that dogs lack or do not use "green" cones, and confuse red and green colors.  The canine visible spectrum is divided in the violet and greenish-yellow ranges.  Additionally, dog discrimination of closely related shades of grey is thought to be superior to that of a human.

Despite its manipulative tear-jerking stunts, Hachi tells a compelling story with likable characters and strong actors.  The train station scenes and season changes are very appealing and capture a strong sense of place.  The dog point-of-view scenes accurately reflect current thinking in canine veterinary ophthalmology, depicting a desaturated and altered color spectrum, but not a total lack of color perception.  I think this movie could have enjoyed modest success at the box office, and I reward this dog DVD with a solid B .