the blind side Tagged Articles at Cinematical

One thing you hear a lot about the great HBO series The Wire is some variation on "it ruined all other cop shows for me." And it's true. The Wire was so smart about policework, so painfully realistic without sacrificing drama, that it made damn near everything else, with the obligatory gun-and-badge-scene clichés and pat little whodunnits, seem downright silly; ridiculous. Creators and writers David Simon and Ed Burns called the bluff of an entire genre. They stripped away the Hollywood varnish and made their peers look goofy, clueless, like so many deer staring at headlights.

Michael Lewis's The Blind Side isn't quite like that, but it's close. Certainly I will henceforth have trouble restraining gales of laughter at the naiveté of football movies about scrappy underdog quarterbacks who overcome the odds and lead their teams to victory. Or about the glory of college football. Or about players who make it to the NFL through sheer pluck and determination.

Even more so than The Wire to lame cop dramas, The Blind Side is an explicit rebuke to such stories. Straight up, Lewis (who also wrote Moneyball) says: it doesn't work that way. First of all, the quarterback isn't even that important. A coach with a handle on strategy and talent elsewhere on the roster, can, within reason, make damn near anyone look good throwing the ball. Second: who makes it to the NFL is determined, 99% of the time, not by persistence and heart, but by genetics. Size. Much more than you might think, shape. Innate athleticism that cannot be taught or learned. Depressingly, the selection process for great football prospects often resembles a state fair where people admire the girth and gait of cattle and "hmm" and point thoughtfully.

The Lovely Bones
In this new film from Peter Jackson a young girl is murdered and watches from the afterlife as her family struggles to come to terms with her death and to find her killer. Based on a bestselling book and starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon, this one hits theaters on December 11.

The Boys Are Back
Clive Owen plays a man whose wife dies suddenly and he finds himself the single father of a young boy and a teenager from a previous marriage. This one gets a limited release on September 25.

The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock stars in this film based on a true story about a well to do white family that takes in an African-American teenage boy and helps him reach his potential as a football player. Watch for this one on November 20.

Let's get this out of the way: I'm no Sandra Bullock bully. I know, I gave her crap for looking all too perky in her long-delayed rom-com All About Steve (which is currently scheduled to bow on September 4th instead of last March, after The Proposal did well by her and The Hangover put co-star Bradley Cooper in a more recognizable realm). But she seems terribly content to play it safe, merely bantering with Hugh Grant or Benjamin Bratt or Ryan Reynolds, with diversions into dramatic territory either little-seen (Infamous, Loverboy) or little-loved (Premonition).

The most prominent exception to that streak would have to be Paul Haggis' Crash, and while I don't think that Bullock is so scheming as to put herself in another Oscar-baiting melodrama out of hopes of continuing that glory to more... individual ends, I hardly think it's coincidence that The Blind Side is the based-on-a-true-story tale of Bullock helping an oversized, undereducated minority teen who in turn makes her a better person. Yahoo! has the trailer; we've included it after the jump.

It seems that Renee Zellweger, the lady of quirky diaries and bunny creation seems to be quite interested in the pigskin lately. She's not doing Bridget Jones 3, or Bridget Jones Way Too Many, so she definitely has the time. In December, Erik Davis shared news that Zellweger would be joining The Office's John Krasinski in George Clooney's Leatherheads, which is a player - fiancee - coach football love triangle. Now, she is looking for a little football of the biopic variety.

According to The Guardian, Zellweger is going to play a foster mother of current pro football prospect Michael Oher -- a left tackle prominently featured in the popular book by Michael Lewis -- The Blind Side - Evolution of the Game, which the film is based on. It's one of those feel-good success stories, much more than the likes of Rudy. Oher was a large, poorly-educated African-American teen who was brought into a wealthy, white Republican family. It seems that she'll pick up the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the woman who, along with her husband, steers Oher into football. He got an education, and is now thought to be one of the leading pics for pro football.

What should make the movie a little more interesting than Zellweger being motherly, or yet another story about solid white folk inspiring a poor, down-trodden African-American kid is Oher himself. The Guardian ends with a story about how Oher handled once being insulted during a school match -- he picked the player up, carried him off the field and when asked, he explained that he "was going to put him back on the bus."

Are you ready for MORE football? 20th Century Fox thinks you are, as they've gone and snatched up the rights to Michael Lewis' (Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game) latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Released yesterday, the book garnered interest from a few other players including New Line and Mandalay. In the end, Fox won out with a deal for $200,000 against $1.5 million.

Blind Side, which revolves around the growing race for bigger (and when I say bigger, I mean BIGGER) football players, is one of several Lewis books that have been optioned over the years, with none of them moving ahead to production. However, with football as popular as it is right now on the big screen, Lewis feels this one definitely has a shot. The main plot focuses on a 16-year-old African American whose father was murdered and whose mother turned to crack. Though, at 344 pounds, the boy knew how to move and, thus, was taken in by a wealthy white couple who groomed him to be one of the top high school football prospects in the country.

Lewis notes, "Of all the books I've written, this is by far the most likely to be made into a movie." Whaddya say folks, how about we throw Eddie Murphy in a fat suit and watch this sucker fly?