The Blind Side
12A, Nationwide
The Blind Side — or ‘The Blahnd Sahd’, as they would say in Tennessee — is so ghastly and annoying and creepy I implore you to steer well clear. I know, I know, it’s based on a true story, Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her performance, and it’s already made $265 million at the US box office, so why should you listen to me? No reason. No reason at all. Mostly, I don’t listen to me and I am me! But I do think you should know this: beneath the swelling music and push-button, Hallmark-style sentimentality, this film is basically about a rich, white, pleased-with-itself family who drag around a poor black boy as if he were some kind of sad old circus bear. Or, as we say in Crouch End, ‘It’s a horrible, my lovelies; quite, quite horrible.’
Adapted from a book by Michael Lewis, and directed by John Lee Hancock, who, at film school, appears to have majored in The Hackneyed Reaction Shot, this is the real story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), or at least should be, but it actually isn’t.
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