Movie Mini Review: The Blind Side

Title: The Blind Side

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron

Plot Summary: An affluent white Southern family adopts an athletically gifted homeless black teen. They provide a bed, home, food and educational assistance that eventually allows the teen to pursue a football career.

My Thoughts: The Blind Side is based on Michael Lewis' book (same name) about physically gifted but socially disadvantaged teen Michael Oher.

The story is fairly well known by now, and the movie is directed as the quintessential holiday feel-good hit. It wastes no time charging the emotions with a sad soundtrack to match the tragic life circumstance of the principal character, Oher.

I have some pretty mixed feelings about the film, and it could be that I'm just over thinking it.

It does deliver on the tugging-at-the-heartstrings mission of the typical holiday hit. Pretty much all of the ladies in the theater were tearing up within 20 minutes of the start of the movie. By the time Michael Oher admitted that "I've never had a bed before" there wasn't a dry female eye in the house.

But there was something about how the film was executed that just made me felt a little uneasy. It's a good story, don't get me wrong. But I don't know if it was the directing or the editing or what, but it just came across to me a bit exploitative.

One problem is that the story is rife with stereotypes. From the affluent southern bigot to the redneck southern bigot to the black gangster thug to the poor ghetto junkie mother, there was no real character development even in the primary characters.

The other problem I had was what I perceived to be a not-so-subtle mixture of white guilt and White Man's Burden. The implication was that these white folk could save the black folk. It was a simplistic portrayal of race relations, where there was an opportunity to take a serious and sincere look at social issues that still exists.

Finally, Sandra Bullock's portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy really was tragic. I guess it could have been the director's fault, but Bullock managed to take what should have been one of the most sympathetic characters -- the woman who took a black kid from the projects into her home, fed him, clothed him and championed his education -- and make her an unlikable shrew.

Bullock's interpretation of Tuohy was that of an uptight, bossy, entitled harpy. Really, I remarked to my Supermodel Wife at about the 30-minute mark that "That woman hasn't smiled once yet." A few minutes later, she managed to squeeze out the ghost of a grin, but made it look painful, like it was about to break her face.

It was really almost enough to make me racist in reverse.

The rest of the cast did an okay job. Tim McGraw played an Everybody Loves Raymond househusband and Jae Head channeled Macaulay Culkin circa 1990 as the youngest sibling. Kathy Bates... was in the movie.

The best acting job probably goes to Quinton Aaron as Michael Oher, though the sparse dialogue and understatedness of the character made it easy for him.

I hate to get too down on the movie. Like I said, a lot of people really liked it and it is a good story -- maybe even inspiring if you don't think too much about it. I would recommend the book over the movie, though.

Final Rating: Two out of five stars.



tagged: movie, review, The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock, Michael Oher, football, Tim McGraw

YouTube Tuesday: You always take things too far...

There are so many lessons to learn in this video, but I think the most important one is that spiders are evil -- like, Twilight Zone evil.

The setup on this one takes a while, but the ending is totally worth it.



tagged: Spider, Youtube, Tuesday, movie, dark humor

Gravity check

So I'm cruising easily down the K12, the quadruple black diamond run at the exclusive ski resort where our family traditionally spends our Thanksgivings.

It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the snow was... well, sitting lightly on the mountain side. It was truly bucolic and I basked in the bucolicness as I passed through 20, 30, 40 miles per hour down the mountain.

I was basking all bucolic-like when suddenly I saw out of the corner of my eye a little white snow bunny dart out from behind a tree, right into the path of my slicing skis. It was only my expert skiing ability that saved the delicate rodent creature from certain decapitation, as I executed a triple-axel-reverse-front-gainer to avoid dealing the death blow.

But as bad luck would have it the tip of my ski lightly clipped an overhanging spruce limb, throwing my equilibrium off just enough that I landed slightly askew on my left foot.

The pain was instantaneous as all my weight combined with my downward and frontward momentum transferred and compressed on my left ankle. I heard a sound like the cracking of knuckles, and while I remained upright on my skis, I made the rest of the run down the mountain in severe pain.

Yeah. That sounds pretty good. Pretty heroic and not at all stupid like the actual true story.

You know, the actual true story where I decided not to wake up our six-month-old daughter, instead carrying her to the nursery to sleep. Then, since I was carrying her and unable to see where I was going, I don't realize when I get to the bottom step of the staircase that there is actually one more step to go.

Then I step out to walk down the hall, but there's no floor there and I end up tipping forward, landing on the side of my foot, having it fold under my ankle and hearing that tell-tale knuckle-cracking sound that (I find out three days later) is also the sound of foot bones fracturing.

Yeah, falling down the stairs is totally lame.

tagged: ski, story, K12, stairs, broken foot, fracture

YouTube Tuesday: It's like the turkeys mounted a counterattack

In honor of the upcoming heartburn holiday later this week, today's edition of YouTube Tuesday remembers one of the greatest Thanksgiving moments in TV history...

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, classic TV, WKRP In Cincinatti, turkey drop, Thanksgiving

Bullitt list -- 11.20.09

Today's category: Goin' Rogue

• Lot's of news on the ladies health care front. First a group appointed by the Federal Department of Health and Human Services (Kathleen Sebelius, proprietor) said women don't need to get mammograms until they're 50 (rather than 40) and they don't need to get them as often.
  
  Next, another group said women don't need to get Pap smears as early nor as often.
  
  It’s pretty clear to see where this is going. When the Gubmint takes over your health care, they're going to need a way to cut spending. The solution, tell you that you don't need as much health care and then not give it to you. Problem solved.


• I heard the talking heads on the insipid morning show this morning bemoaning the departure of Oprah Winfrey from the airwaves in 2011.
  
  The final comment that made me leave the room was when one of the ditsy hosts asked a guest "expert" "How will the audience fill the void left by the departure of Oprah's show?"
  
  Are you kidding me? Look at the ratings, toots. There is no void left by Oprah's show. Why do you think she's calling it quits to begin with? When you're best ratings come from an interview with Sarah Palin, you're probably doing well if you can keep yourself from taking a flying leap off the Hancock Center.


• Think the Great Banker Bailout of 2009 was fun? Well, just wait until next year when we all get to bail out the entire state of California.
  
  The LA Times reported that there's no end in site to CA's budget woe's -- currently in a $21 billion deficit -- even after the latest tax increases and draconian cuts in state services.
  
  It's okay though. California has a plan. They have enacted stricter energy efficiency standards on televisions sets that will probably increase the price of the TV's and encourage people to buy new HDTVs in Nevada or Arizona or Tijuana.
  
  So at lease we know the CA legislature has its priorities straight.


• And here's a final WTF story to end your week on: Peruvian Police have busted a gang that they say was killing people to harvest their body fat.
  
  Check this out:

  Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists.
  
  Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru's anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn't the only one doing such killings.

  According to the story, the suspects claim the bottles of liquid human fat they were carrying when they were arrested would fetch $60,000 a gallon on the international market.
  
  Given that, I'm thinking KU Athletic Director Lew Perkins might want to think twice about firing Coach Mark Mangino. I don't know if they can afford to loose that kind of natural resource.

tagged: Bullitt, movies, mammogram, Pap smear, health care, Kathleen Sebelius, Oprah Winfrey, Hancock, pop culture, California, TV, Peru, fat, Mangino

Vocabulary

I was doing my dadly duty last week, taking my 7-year-old daughter to a school skating party.

She had missed the previous skating party and was totally jonesing for a skate. She was so eager to go to the party that we were able to hold it over her blackmail-style and get some extra good behavior and chores "or else your not going to get to go skating."

Anyway, we get to the skating rink, put on her skates and let her out on the floor to knock herself out -- not literally of course, she's not a great skater but she only fell two or three times. And with the exception of a quick snack break, she spent pretty much the whole time on shuffling around the skate floor.

Toward the end of the skating party, I was standing on the carpet waiting for her to come out to return the skates. She rolled off the floor and we went over to a bench to change shoes.

She pulls me down to say something into my ear.

"One of those bigger kids out there said the 'F Word'" she said.

I just kind of blinked and I think I may have done a short sigh.

"Well, just don't listen when you hear that," I replied. I was pretty calm. I said it in the same tone you might use when saying "Just remember to wash your face after the dog licks all of the peanut butter off."

You see, I'd done this quick calculation in my mind. I don't want to fly off the handle and make "The F Word" seem like it's this big magical mystery word. I don't want to encourage her to say the word by banning her from uttering it. It's human nature to want to do something that someone tells you you can do.

I didn't want to turn "The F Word" into some kind of forbidden fruit.

But I also want to let her know that I do not approve of her using that word at her age.

But later, when we got home, I know she was still curious. Out of earshot of her Supermodel Mother, she came and whispered in my ear once again...

"Do you know what the F Word is," she asked, as if she were privy to secret information that I didn't have. "Do you want me to tell it to you?"

"No" I said. "I don't want to hear it and I don't want you to say it."

I don't think the issue is over. I'm sure she heard it at school. In subsequent conversations, she implied that one of the boys (Boys... sheesh... don't even get me started!) in her class had been saying it.

Well, I guess first grade is when you start learning these things...

tagged: family, vocabulary, parenting, F Word, first grade, fatherhood

YouTube Tuesday: Fear and Loathing in the Major Leagues

No real theme to today's edition of YouTube Tuesday. It's just that I ran across this amazingly entertaining story of the role of LSD in a major league pitcher's no-hitter back in the '70s.

Here's what the YouTube description has to say:

In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis' legendary LSD no-hitter. In the past few years weve heard all too much about performance enhancing drugs from greenies to tetrahydrogestrinone, and not enough about performance inhibiting drugs. If our evaluation of the records of athletes like Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Marion Jones, and Barry Bonds needs to be revised downwards with an asterisk, we submit that that Dock Ellis record deserves a giant exclamation point. Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.

Check it...

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, LSD, drugs, baseball, Dock Ellis, culture

Interview with a giant

One of the most anticipated (by me) movie premiers in years is John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- now set to debut on Nov. 25.

I'm going to assume that the book is widely enough known that I don't need to give a synopsis of the story line. The film has been in post-production/pre-release for a what seems like forever. I think it was originally supposed to be released last year at about this time.

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's the trailer which shows why this movie is sure to be the feel-good hit of the Christmas season:


Looks charming, no?

Anyway, McCarthy himself has the reputation of being a reclusive genius. So when Friday's Wall Street Journal interview with him popped up on my feed reader, I was eager to see what he had to say.

And he didn't disappoint.

I don't want to swagger jack the WSJ so I'll encourage you to go read the interview for yourself, especially if your a huge McCarthy fan. He did seem to have some tacit condemnation for the vast amount of what we call "user generated content." I don't know how aware McCarthy is of blogging and social media, but the quote below was in reference to the amount of content put out by Hollywood:

Well, I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.

And there's also this insight on the nature of mankind. It says a lot about the perspective from which a lot of his writing comes.

I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble. But people tell me from time to time that my son John is just a wonderful kid. I tell people that he is so morally superior to me that I feel foolish correcting him about things, but I've got to do something--I'm his father. There's not much you can do to try to make a child into something that he's not. But whatever he is, you can sure destroy it. Just be mean and cruel and you can destroy the best person.

Like I said, there's lots more great stuff in the interview, so go check it out.

tagged: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, movie, trailer, interview, Wall Street Journal

Science for sale

A few weeks ago, my Supermodel Wife and I were skulking around Parkville when we stumbled into what may be the coolest store in the KC Metro area.

Now before I go on I know that there are certain people out there who will assume that when I say it's a "cool" store that it's stocked with skinny jeans and brand new retro-looking T-shirts and pumps club-mix music through the store speakers.

Or that it's got racks full of pretentious expensive wines and a full-court walk-in humidor with a Scotch tasting stand in between (although, that would be extremely cool).

No. When I say cool, I mean the 2009 definition of cool. You know, where things that we would have been called nerdy back in high school is actually cool now. This is good news for me since I was kind of nerdy back in high school but superhellacool now.

Anyway, the store is called HMS Beagle and it's chock full of sciencey stuff. The store is named after the famous ship on which Charles Darwin made his scientific voyages that lead to his theories on natural selection and evolution.

The owners bill it as the "ultimate science store" -- and after losing track of time while browsing there, I can't argue with that claim.

When we visited, for instance, there was an electrolysis contraption set up on the counter separating hydrogen and oxygen from water. In addition to all of the chemistry gear, there's paraphernalia related to electronics and robotics, astrology, entomology, palaeontology and geology.

It's amazing the kind of stuff they have there. Cases full of fossils -- some of it found around the region. I got a real kick out of showing my wife some of the samples of coprolite.

We visited with one of the store owners, John Kuhns, for a few minutes. He told us about all of the science clubs the store sponsors for youth and adults and about their frequent fossil hunting trips.

After a few minutes, he pushed a flashing LED-laden circuit board across the counter to me and pushed a button. As the sequence of LEDs flashed in a pattern, he asked me if I knew what it was doing.

After a few seconds, I realized that it was counting up in binary, which gave me an opening to share one of my favorite nerd jokes with him...

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

tagged: Parkville, science, Darwin, HMS Beagle, chemistry, geology, Missouri

Bullitt list -- 11.12.09

Today's category: Face value

• Is it just me or does Major Nidal Malik Hasan look a lot like Andre Agassi. Not the young Andre Agassi with the long flowing locks and day-glow orange Nike sneakers, but the old, bald strung-out-on-meth Andre Agassi.
  And how much does it suck to be a person of Middle Eastern descent in the United States these days. My cube neighbor, Musheer, threw his hands up incredulously when this story came out. "Oh great! This is just what we need!." I feel for you, brother.
  
  
• As you know, the House of Misrepresentatives passed a healthcare reform bill last weekend. Some people will consider this bill the "change" promised by the Obama Syndicate lo those many months ago. Those people will be wrong. Our government has been wasting money on Federally financed "entitlements" for decades. Nothing new here, just more of the same. Doctors and pharmaceutical company executives should be happy, though.
  
  Oh, and if any of the congress critters bothered to actually read the entire (roughly 2,000 pages) health care bill before they voted for it, I'll eat XO's Kangol.


• I saw the report from the Center for Responsive Politics that showed there are 237 millionaires in Congress. That's nearly half of the Congress (44 percent to be exact), as compared to 1 percent of the general public who are millionaires. Anyone still believe you are represented in Washington?
  
  The same report showed that of the 10 richest millionaires, 8 are Democrats. There's nothing wrong with being rich, but those of you who like to play in the partisan politics game should now realize how meaningless the term "rich Republicans" is. As I've been saying for a long time, there's no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.
  

• Telegraph UK reported yesterday that, based on applications to BeautifulPeople.com (really, there's a website called BeautifulPeople.com? Does anyone even want to argue that our culture has completely waned at this point?), the British are the ugliest people in the world.
  
  This is incredibly offensive. Are we really so shallow as to judge an entire nationality on such superficial criteria? Really?
  
  
• I've never had to knock on wood, but I know someone who has which makes me wonder if I could. It makes me wonder if I've never had to knock on wood. And I'm glad I haven't yet, because I'm sure it isn't good. That's the impression that I get.
  

tagged: Bullitt, movies, Nidal, Agassi, health care, Congress, millionaire, Kangol, pop culture, British, ugly, Amy Winehouse