The Blind Side (2009)

Directed by: John Lee Hancock
Starring: Sandra Bullock

*1/2

The only reason I saw this movie was to see what all the hype surrounding Sandra Bullock's performance was about.  I don't claim to know everything about movie or think that I'm always right but The Blind Side marks the second movie of the year that despite what word of mouth suggests, I was correct in assuming that its a bad movie.

Where to begin... I'll start with the film itself, as this is a review of the movie and not solely the performance of Bullock. Throughout the 128 minutes I had to endure, I found that not a single frame of this film was anything other than cliched.  Every element that makes movies like this fail made its way into this one. Its as if writer director John Lee Hancock watched Freedom Writers, Glory Road and Coach Carter (I haven't seen any of these for the same reason I shouldn't have watched The Blind Side) without anyone telling him that there were not good films to reference.  I could start reeling off lines of dialogue that aided in making this film as cliched as it is, but we've all heard them before... "you can do whatever you want to do"... So, I said one.

It appeared that Hancock took filmmaking 101 then stopped there. With a movie like this, I can't really fault him for avoiding risks and just sticking with pretty basic filmmaking sticking Quinton Aaron standing emotionless in front of medium shot gets really boring.  The Blind Side, however, is not a boring movie. If it were boring, it'd be easier to shut off. What it is instead, is bad.  Its expected that even in movies based on true stories are going to take some creative liberties, either with story or character. Its importatnt as life doesn't always portray the kind of drama that entertains. So assuming that's what happened here, I gave a few things the benefit of the doubt but I refused to accept this is a heart felt tale telling the true heartbreaking turned uplifting story of Michael Oher's life.

Is this movie racist? Well, no, its not but I could understand the argument.  The film tries to pawn off rich white people's differing opinions of a black boy on their side of town as the status quo of their time period in Memphis. I don't know if that worked but the film doesn't in any way try to be racist. What it is instead... is obnoxious. The gap between the accepting white people and those who don't understand thus don't want to help Michael is so wide that I started to wonder if it would work better if the film was opening racist. Had the characters said something along the lines of... "I won't help him because he's black" at least their motives would have been justified, even if not morally so.

And on to the performances... Sandra Bullock has received a lot of praise and numerous awards for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy.  Leigh Anne is a strong and emotional woman and Bullock definitely puts forth an emotional performance, if displaying the same emotion for two hours is still considered emotional, and a strong performance as well if that means doing well acting against the brick walls that are the other actors in the film. When Tim McGraw and Nick Saban were the second and third best performances in the film, your movie has issues.  I'm just kidding about Saban, he wasn't good, but he wasn't as bad as you'd think. I was actually more impressed with McGraw than I was with Bullock. Not that he was better, but on a sliding scale,  McGraw almost put forth a better effort than the more seasoned actress, Bullock.  Bullock was good. Part of me would tread, tread lightly, into suggesting that she was very good but being in the middle of such a bad movie made it very difficult for her to define herself. Its not unusual for a good performance to be in a bad movie, but this isn't one of those movies simply defined by a performance. This movie could never have expected to get such recognition thanks to Bullock. That being said, her performance is hardly worthy of the awards she's been getting and if she gets nominated for anything else, its purely due to a lack of options.

So I'm left with the question as to weather I'm glad I watched this movie.  I'm glad I now have my own opinion of Bullock's performance but I'm also annoyed that I didn't spend those two hours doing anything else.  I saw this film for the same reason I saw The Hangover... I was curious about all the hype. Unlike The Hangover however, I don't really understand why people seem to like this movie or why its made money. The Hangover has a really big demographic (all those people who love sucky movies), but the sports movie that isn't really about sports doesn't attract a huge audience... at least I didn't think it did and there's nothing else about this movie that suggests box office magic, or any kind of magic.