The Blind Side

2009 big-screen after-school special

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 15/20; Emma: 15/20; Abbey: 18/20)

Plot: The extraordinary true story of Michael Oher, a troubled black teen without a home or family who is transformed overnight into a student-athlete after the well-to-do Touly family takes him in and feeds him turkey.

Somebody made Dylan watch this at school, and he told me, after his class had almost finished the entire thing, that it was a great movie, one that he would rate an 18. That's three times what he rated Dr. Strangelove, by the way. So we watched it, actually finishing the movie before he got a chance to watch the rest. I told him he was going to feel let down by the ending because Oher ends up devouring the Touly son S.J. Sandra Bullock walks in and watches in horror as Oher gnaws the rest of S.J.'s flesh from what appears to be a bloody, tooth-marked femur, and screams, "Big Mike! What are you doing?" Oher looks at her with this demented look in his eyes, a string of cartilage dangling from his lips, and exclaims with a mouth full of S.J., "I told you not to call me Big Mike!" That would have made this a much, much better movie, but a much, much less extraordinary true story. Speaking of S.J., I don't see how anybody can watch Jae Head's performance, a slightly-more-obnoxious-than-normal child performance, and consider this as a Best Picture nominee. His first line ("It's girl's volleyball, mom. You didn't miss anything.") almost made me stop watching The Blind Side. Sandra Bullock's critically-acclaimed performance isn't much better though. I wasn't as impressed with her down-home accent and tough-cookie personality as most seemed to be. It seemed to me that she had only a single move that she used over and over in this movie--a sideways glance with slightly-parted lips that she'd use whenever another character in the movie said anything to her. It kind of made her character seem dumb a lot of the time. This alternates between bland, derivative, and overly sentimental, and although the story is a nice one, I don't get the hype. It's definitely not three times better than Dr. Strangelove.