Word: blindings
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...hindsight, The Blind Side's combination of dewy do-gooderism and combat sports seems perfectly calculated to reach the widest demographic. Boys love violence; girls love love. Boys love football; girls love stories of strong women bucking the odds. The picture cagily begins with a dose of football mayhem: Lawrence Taylor's crippling 1985 takedown of Joe Theismann, later voted the NFL's Most Shocking Moment in History in an ESPN poll. That gets the guys' attention. And for the gals, there's Sandra Bullock, at age 45 the No. 1 movie heroine (after her summer smash The Proposal...
...same day, targeting similar demographics, have had folks cheering and sobbing and clogging the plexes. Everyone expected The Twilight Saga: New Moon to be a smash, and it has not disappointed, piling up nearly half a billion dollars in less than a fortnight. But few were prepared for The Blind Side. The movie, made for just $29 million, has flummoxed Hollywood by earning about $105 million. On Thursday and Sunday, it sold more tickets than the vampire movie. The Blind Side is an old-fashioned, out-of-nowhere hit. (See pictures of the characters from The Twilight Saga: New Moon...
...black teenager who was adopted by a white couple and, after many a challenge, became a star tackle at the University of Mississippi. (Today, Oher is an acclaimed rookie for the Baltimore Ravens.) A true story that sounds like it's the most improbable type of uplifting fiction, The Blind Side could have been one of the dozens of sports inspirationals that reach their core audiences, moisten many eyes and retire quickly to the DVD shelves. Yet it's obviously connecting on a grand scale and at a high intensity. So I decided to grab the tail of this comet...
Reviewing the movie for Slant, Aaron Cutler goes further: "The ultimate NFL destination renders the whole thing benevolently sadistic: A white community first removes Michael from other black people, then trains him to beat them up on the field." Well, The Blind Side isn't exactly Gladiator. Oher is being paid well to do what hundreds of thousands of young men dream of. And if he had been left on the streets of Memphis, he might be dead now. But for all the closeups of black-white handshakes, the movie does have a Manichean view of the racial divide...
There are similarities between The Blind Side and Precious, the hit indie film about a pregnant, illiterate teenage girl whose teacher goads her toward self-worth. Both Michael and Precious begin as scholastic failures with awful moms and no hope who are reclaimed and saved by a caring adult woman. Except that, here, we see the awkward teen through the eyes of his white benefactor. Leigh Anne's first visit to Michael's old neighborhood is treated like Margaret Mead landing on Samoa. She delivers tough love to Michael's mother and tough lip to the local drug lords...