The Blind Side

My friend and I first saw previews for The Blind Side a few months ago and we almost teared up during the trailer itself. We went and saw it opening night and were not disappointed.

What pleasantly surprised me about the movie was that the focus was not on football. There are a lot of football movies about what the players overcome, but in some way football tends to be the focus of the movie. In this movie, the focus was on a boy named Mike and his struggles. It showed the emotion of every character, every event.

Sandra Bullock’s character, who becomes Mike’s mother, is strong and courageous and easy to like. It’s one of the strongest roles I’ve ever seen her in. It’s completely believable and makes you think, "Hey, there are good people out there". She’s the type of character that makes you want to do good things without ever feeling like you’re being preached at.

There is comedic relief throughout, mainly through the character of the younger son, who is the first in the Tooley family to befriend Mike. This is also the character who makes Mike’s football talent known to college recruiters.

The beginning of the movie is set up to make you wonder if Mike did something awful and what he did to get in a situation where a woman is asking him about the oddities of his situation. Then you flashback and watch everything that brought him to this point. Sleeping in laundry mats, picking up old bags of popcorn after a volleyball game, carrying all his belongings in one plastic grocery bag. By the time you return to the scene at the beginning of the movie, you’ve forgotten it was there to begin with, and all the pieces make sense.

You’ll be rooting for Mike’s character the entire time, as he starts to study with a private tutor to make the GPA required to get into college on a football scholarship. You’ll laugh at the antics that are found brilliantly woven into the scenes. You’ll smile every time Mike proves over and over that he was meant for something more than what he came from.

It’s one of the best feel-good movies I’ve seen in a long time and I look forward to seeing it again this weekend. I’d recommend it to anyone that has had any form of problem in their life. So, essentially, I’d recommend this movie to anyone.