Try watching slasher parody Scream 4 with your eyes closed and see how much sense it makes. Likewise, the films that comprise Marvel's acclaimed Avengers mega-franchise might seem like a mess if you stripped away the CGI-heavy visuals. On the other hand, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and Kevin Smith's Clerks, with stories driven by strong characters and dialogue, offer up cinematic pleasures even a blind person can appreciate.
Welcome to the world of Tommy Edison. Blind since birth, Edison has over the past four years earned global fame with his YouTube channel The Blind Film Critic. His enthusiasm, easy humour and keen insights while reviewing films both current and classic from the perspective of a blind person have seen him build a considerable following.
'I'd always talked about movies where I could follow the whole story, and then in the last few minutes, they don't talk any more, it's all music and cinematography, and I have no idea how the story ended,' Edison recalls. Recognising a need for blind people to know what they were in for when handing over their money at the box office, he teamed up with his friend, producer and director Ben Churchill.
'We saw Scream 4, shot a review, and put it online,' Edison says. He didn't pull any punches: 'We've waited 11 years for Scream 4,' he says in the intro to that review. 'I hope you like it!' 'I have no idea what happened in the last 20 minutes of this movie,' he continues. 'There were a couple of times where the audience clapped and I thought it was over, but more things kept happening …'
The late great film critic Roger Ebert tweeted a link to Edison's Scream 4 review, and the rest is history. Edison got busy reviewing the latest blockbusters, and fielding requests to have a go at some of his new fans' old favourites.
On the face of it, film is by definition a visual medium. Yet Edison judges films on the quality of the dialogue and its effectiveness in conveying the story, on the vocal performances of the actors, and on the ways in which sound and music help to immerse and engage the blind cinemagoer in the experience of the film. 'The CGI stuff, like Thor, X-Men, these kind of things, may be nice to look at, but there's not much story to it … I get lost.'
In energetic, dialogue-driven films such as Goodfellas and Clerks,