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The Blind Side takes the true story of a young man who went from abandonment to success as a pro-football player and treats it with respect. The movie doesn’t oversell what is, on the face of it, already compelling. It’s almost impossible to describe the plot without sounding painfully inspirational: Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron, Be Kind Rewind), a hulking but gentle African-American teen in Tennessee, gets taken in by a well-to-do white family; the mother, Leigh Anne Touhy (…
The Blind Side
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March 6th, 2010 at 8:40 am
It is predictable and never subtle and with a performance from Sandra Bullock (who is always predictable) it is not worth your time. But it is very mainstream and will fit well on TBS.
Rating: 1 / 5
March 6th, 2010 at 9:34 am
A huge and hugely inarticulate African American teen-ager from a broken family is adopted by a southern white couple, who help him become a football star and come out of his shell, and he winds up with a college scholarship.
Sounds heartwarming, inspiring, the kind that you want to get up and cheer at the end of, doesn’t it? Well — for me, anyway, the reality was a little different.
The young actor playing teen-ager Michael Oher, Quinton Aaron, may have only been playing the part the way he saw it — but he seems to have as much acting ability as a huge block of coal. Tim McGraw as Sean Tuohy, the husband and father in the white family, spends a lot of his time doing whatever his wife tells him and marveling at how lucky he was to get her.
But it is Sandra Bullock, the wife Leigh Anne Tuohy, who really spoils this movie for me. With long, flowing blonde hair (dyed for the part), and a series of fanny-flattering straight skirts and tight slacks, she is certainly pleasing to look at — until she opens her mouth. To put it mildly, her nickname could fittingly have been “Momma Sass.”
Momma orders her family around, tells football coaches how to do their job, does a “shamey-shamey” white guilt trip on her female friends when they suggest that having a young black man living with her family that includes a teen-age daughter might not be just the wisest thing to do, and is in general just too insufferably cocky and bumptious for my taste. She even talks trash to a group of black gang members in a public housing project where she has gone to look for the missing Michael — and gets away with it. I’m amazed she was not shown doing a rap song she had improvised on the spot — she can seemingly do everything else. The only person in the movie allowed to out-sass Momma and leave her without a snappy comeback is a fat, black female office manager at a license branch. Is anyone surprised?
Oher’s scenes with the Tuohys’ young son are mildly charming — one of the few bright spots, in my estimation. But those bright spots are all too few.
Golden Globe for Bullock as best actress? OK — that was their decision to make. To paraphrase something Harry Truman once said, “I didn’t give it to her.” Way, way too much cocksureness — and practically none of the blowback she would get from the people she’s ordering around and smart-mouthing, if this was real life. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them for a good movie. But please, Mr. Hancock (the director and screenwriter): Don’t tinkle on my shoes, then tell me it’s raining.
Rating: 3 / 5
March 6th, 2010 at 11:33 am
Right from the previews it seemed like a mountain of cliches. But a best picture & best actress nomination later, I felt I had to give it a chance.
Two hours later, I have absolutely no idea why the movie got those nominations. The inspiring story of Michael Oher is the only redeeming quality. But that had nothing to do with the movie making.
The direction was abysmal with every known Lifetime device being employed to fashion some emotion in the viewer. It never succeeds. It just made more annoyed at a wonderful story being mistreated by Hollywood just like what they did with Invictus. There are several other movies deserving of that Best Picture nominations.
Sandra Bullock acting is passable although annoying at times. But it is nowhere worthy of an Oscar nomination. There are certainly other performances out there worthy of that slot – case in point Abbie Cornish in Bright Star, Samantha Morton in The Messenger, Michelle Monaghan in Trucker.
The only reasoning I can think of for these nominations is – White Guilt. Yeah, I said it. The Oscar nominations committee is most likely predominantly white. So a story of a white woman changing the life of a black kid mixed in with a good dose of Christian overtones makes the nominations committee feel better about themselves.
Nothing else.
Rating: 2 / 5
March 6th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
When I saw a preview for “The Blind Side” attached to “Shorts” back in August, I had mixed feelings about it. Some good reasons could because of Sandra Bullock and football, but do we really need a depressing film for the holiday season. Ehh…not really. Actually no. But it’s about football, so of course we need a football story to top it all off for the Thanksgiving weekend. After all, having family over, we always watch football. I went into a showing for “The Blind Side” over the weekend, expecting good and bad from this film.
But something strange went on. Yes, I ended up liking it. But is “The Blind Side” really a football story? No. It’s more of a story about accomplishing your goals and fitting in. It’s not really a football story. It’s more of a family comedy that you can basically that most people could at least breathe. It is a true story about a football player named Michael Oher, but it’s not a football story.
“The Blind Side” is basically tells the story from two points of view. One story is basically Sandra Bullock’s side where she plays a woman named Leigh Anne who has a nice family, her daughter and son are in school and she has a husband. But one night, she finds this homeless kid named Michael Oher and decides to keep him. Michael is the most troubled person she has ever met. You’ll end up getting one half of the story being about football, but the rest of the half is basically the part where Leigh Anne tries to have Michael Oher fit in and further his education so he can go to college and eventually become a famous football player.
Yes, I have to admit. Most emotional melodramas aren’t really that good towards critics. But I’m actually proud that many critics found something impressing to watch. “The Blind Side” isn’t just an emotional melodrama, it’s also a comedy that will make everyone laugh. The best character of the film is Sandra Bullock’s son SJ. SJ happens to steal the show with his jokes that made everyone laugh. For many moments throughout the movie, I started to laugh and laugh. There are a few scenes that will make you laugh and there are plenty of other tearjerking moments, but “The Blind Side” does fill up the hole in its mark.
Sandra Bullock happens to have her mix of good and bad. Some movies like the original “Miss Congeniality” film is really good, but she stunk it up with “The Proposal” this past June. But with her new movie, “The Blind Side,” she looks prettier than ever. “The Blind Side” tends to feel up the warmth of the football season and will eventually make everyone laugh. Keep it up, Sandra, if you end up in something like this, and if you’re reading this, I know you’ll do better in the future. In sum, “The Blind Side” is very funny.
Rating: 3 / 5
March 6th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
The previews of the movie were quite discouraging. Seeing Sandra Bullock in the movie “The Proposal” gave me a chill of her masculine rude demeanor. The previews enforced the same image of an over-confident yet shallow woman. In this movie, Bullock still holds that stiffed attitude of hollowness, concealed under the façade of overconfidence.
I doubt that a sensitive woman like the real Leigh Anne Touhy would venture into a dangerous ghetto in such provocative attire that the movie displayed. At least, a woman that believed in standing by the underdog would also display sense of modesty. In the photo of the real Michael Oher, Leigh Anne Touhy sounded more down-to-earth than her actress counter-part.
The scene when Bullock walked into the field, slammed the coach on his rear end, and grabbed two male players by their helmets could only happen in a movie. The idea of having a woman with the noble motive who could salvage the future of desperate poor adolescent conflicts with the harshness and meanness of an aggressive woman who overrides a football coach by her intrusive and improvised coaching.
The best two actors in the whole movie were those played by Tim McGraw in the role of the husband and Jae Head in the role of the son of the white family. The little boy acted brilliantly in solving many formidable problems for which reserved adults could not comprehend a solution. Tim McGraw behaved naturally unrestricted and without the excessive show of meanness of Bullock.
The “blind side”, in the Blind Side movie, conveys many meanings: the blinding of detached and intoxicated poor people from the realities of modernity, the blinding of middle class people by long rooted hateful racism, the blinding of educators emphasizing grades over human circumstances, the blinding of football fans by entertainment and winning over character, the blinding of sports promoters by money and success, and the blinding of political organizations to the real struggle of the majority of the poor.
The most prominent blinding was the breaking through the boundaries of poverty by the mere chance of entertaining the wealthy racist southerns by an overweight black child. For Oher’s dilemma to get attention, it required many odd circumstances to work in his favor. The cold and freezing weather, the big, tall and poorly dressed black boy, crossing the street in front of a BMW in a white Christian neighborhood, and the calming demeanor of the helpless boy, all worked to bend the subconsciousness of passersby to his predicament.
Rating: 5 / 5