Sarah Palin: the movie

Rating: 4/10 (9 December 2009)

America is a pretty good country. We are at once progressive and compassionate. We have an elected president who is not just a man of color, but also highly intelligent and supremely wise. Christ, not even the snooty British or other so-called inclusive European countries- who often rebuke our American character and psychology- can lay claim to such an awesome achievement.
While I am proud to be an American, I'm not too proud to have "The Blind Side" be our movie phenomena of the year. This is not cool. What has been created here is an insipid drama that insults audience intelligence. Not only that, it's ineffably racist and poorly dramatized.
Firstly, if I was a black guy I would seriously be insulted by this movie. The character of Michael Oher is little more than a modern reworking of Uncle Tom; while the nice white middle-class suburbanite characters pity his appalling ghetto poverty and nasty urban community whom peddle drugs, take drug or vilify nice white people who are trying to protect them from fooling with drugs and guns. There is not one character of color that can be regarded as three-dimensional. For that matter, there's not even one white character in this movie that's three-dimensional. Everything about this movie: from themes, characters and politics- is lowest-denominator.
The plot is totally by the numbers. I didn't know much about this film before watching it, but 5 minutes in I knew where it was going. I knew all the conflicts that were going to pop up and how effortlessly they'd be overcome. I knew there'd be no real character arc for Leigh Anne Tuohy, and the dramatic growth of Michael Oher's character was without any sort of surprise. It was simplistic in every way.
I read somewhere on in the comments pages that this was Sandra Bullock's 'masterpiece'. I beg to disagree. Ms. Bullock has yet to make a masterpiece, or deliver a performance that can be deemed masterful. (That's not saying she isn't a good actress or not pretty, because she is: very much so.) For that matter, hasn't Kathy Bates played the exact same role in her last 17 movies? Talk about type casting. Furthermore, the kid playing S.J. was the most annoying child depicted in film. He sucked. I wanted him to get written-off in the car crash scene.
This is a bad movie. One that doesn't deserve to be as huge as what it's become.