The Blind Side

Hollywood’s Side of Real Life Story

The Story:

Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless African-American youngster from a broken home, is taken in by Leigh Ann Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) to live with her family, who will help Oher to fulfill his potential.

At the same time, Oher’s presence in the Touhys’ lives leads them to some insightful self-discoveries of their own. Living in his new environment, the teen faces a completely different set of challenges to overcome.

When Oher expresses an interest in football, Leigh Ann goes all out to help him, including giving the coach a few ideas on how best to use Michael’s skills. As a football player and student, Oher works hard and, with the help of his coaches and adopted family, becomes an All-American offensive left tackle.

Release Date: November 20, 2009 (wide)

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Directed by: John Lee Hancock (Hard Time Romance, The Rookie, The Alamo)

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw, Jae Head, Lily Collins, Kathy Bates

Budget: $29,000,000

Gross Revenue:$255,071,943 (US) and $301,575,361 (worldwide)

Review:

As American no.1 sport, football has make its way to movie industries numerous times. Jerry Maguire, Any Given Sunday, and The Replacement are some of the memorable titles that used football as main theme. Few of them also based on true story, Remember The Titans to name one.

If you’ve watched those movies or other similar theme with different sports, you won’t find anything new in The Blind Side. To shortened the main plot, it’s a story of homeless black teenager, Michael Oher, who adopted by wealthy-white-family, and then he discovered his love for football, and fought his way to enter the big league.

The main conflict here is how the Tuohys family tried to make Michael adept in his new environment, and how to turn this less-educated kid to reach the minimum GPA for sport-scholarship so he can still plays football in college.

I don’t know how the real stroy is, but this movie was too flat. It should have more frictions, for example the Tuohys family seem to easily accept Michael into their family. The family has two children, S.J and Collins, which seem to get along with their new brother just fine. There was not much detail about how they can welcomed someone so different as their family member.

Okay, Sandra Bullock won her first Oscar in this movie as best actress. And this is the strength of The Blind Side, characters play. All cast of this movie perfectly fit into the story and made the characters alive. Not just Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron (Michael Oher), Tim McGraw (Sean), even the children (Jae Head and Lily Collins) also gave an extraordinary performances. There was also special appearance by veteran actress Kathy Bates as Miss Sue, Michael’s private teacher.

Overall, this is a good family movie with a nice moral lessons, and Sandra Bullock gave her once-in-a-lifetime performance for this film as the fussy Mrs. Tuohy.

My Rating: B+

IMDb user rating: 7.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes meter: 67%

Metacritic:53/100

Yahoo! critics: C+

Yahoo! users: A

Your Ratings: (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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Note that ratings and gross revenue are based from when this review was written, so the values might already changed by now.