The FTT Movie Review: The Blind Side

I will, of course, convince no one in the review of a movie that's extremely well known, and has been out for years, just because it finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue. And the reason it took so long to make it that high is that I was afraid that a truly great book -- which is what Michael Lewis did and wrote -- would disappear into a cookie-cutter Hollywood sports movie script.

That's because "The Blind Side" is really two books in one. It's a treatment and history of football, along with the personal story of Michael Oher, the mammoth homeless kid from the Memphis projects who found his way into an upper-class family, and eventually winds up as a first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens. And the movie, of course, is only half of those things, since a doctrinaire history of football wouldn't exactly play in cineplexes across the country, or bring in a multi-part demographic.

"The Blind Side", of course, isn't really about football. It's a well-acted soap opera that's saved from treacle by the performances and chemistry generated by leads Sandra Bullock and Quinton Aaron, and they do their work well enough so that you can almost completely ignore the icky racial overtones of Rich White People Solving Everything, or the small but telling point that we can only find the human worth of a homeless kid if he's 6'6+, 350 pounds, and fast. The football scenes are rudimentary, and playing offensive tackle is more or less reduced to pancaking people or giving up sacks. Oher's uncovered relationship to his teammates, how he interacts with the other offensive linemen (there are other offensive linemen?), or the plainly ridiculous notion that he needs Bullock's help to turn from a marshmallow to a terror in the span of three minutes, in the middle of practice... well, what the hell. You knew what you were getting into here. Come in with the proper expectations, and this thing will even seem to have slight indie film sensibilities. Very slight. Or just might be the only movie with football in it that you can watch with a spouse or kid that doesn't care about the game.

So anyway, if you've been like me and afraid to watch this thing for the weepy girl-movie aspects of it, give it a spin anyway. It moves, has some nice scenes and dialog, and it's not as if you are ever going to see another movie starring an offensive lineman in this world. Plus, there's lot of Joe Theismann's leg being snapped like a twig. And that just keeps getting funnier...