Shades of Walt Disney

Rating: 5/10 (13 March 2010)

This relentlessly feel good movie strives and succeeds in all it sets out to do. It reassures us all that not only is all well with the world, it really is a pretty wonderful place. Walt Disney would be proud.
Disney's family fare of the sixties portrayed characters as totally one dimensional. The mean were mean, the kind were kind, etc. etc. Characters simply had no inner conflicts or doubts. Audiences, particularly children, found this spoon fed story telling very enjoyable. If only life were that simple.
Well in "The Blind Side" life is that simple. The characters in the movie are unashamedly one dimensional. This good natured family doesn't bat an eyelid about taking in an underprivileged over-sized young black teenager into their smart home. They might as well have picked up a stray pet. Those squeaky clean smiling children take to Big Mike from the projects without a hint of hesitation.
There is nothing wrong with movies reaffirming the basic goodness of mankind. God knows there are enough that have succeeded in proving the opposite. But pandering to the need to believe in such goodness in such a simplistic, needless to say, unrealistic manner is misguided. It's making us feel good at the cost of integrity - and succeeding.
Sandra Bullock does with the role exactly what she's demanded to do and that really is not very much in the way of an acting stretch. We've seen her good nature shine numerous times before. Why this time it garnered her an Oscar is very probably as she herself put it, she
simply wore them down.