Monday, Nov. 23, 2009

Sandra Bullock scores big in 'The Blind Side'

By Gary Wolcott, special to the Herald

The Blind Side tackles football and the much more interesting sport of real life. Michael Oher was drafted by the National Football League's Baltimore Ravens this year and is now a rich pro athlete. Learning how Oher got from nothing to the NFL will take you a couple of hours and three soggy hankies.

Big, lumbering and academically slow, Oher is a ghetto born kid. In the game of life, that's fourth down and 40 yards to go. His break came when he played football for a Christian school and was adopted by a fairly well-to-do white family.

The movie version of his life, The Blind Side embellishes Oher's story a bit. OK, a lot. Normally I'd throw a penalty flag. Two words keep it in my pocket: Sandra Bullock. You're hearing quite a bit of Oscar buzz and it's deserved. Bullock adds two extra dimensions to her usual one dimensional, cutesy, addlebrained personality and gives the performance of her life.

Credit writer/director John Lee Hancock's (The Rookie) excellent dialogue for part of Bullock's transformation. I'm admittedly biased. In my book you can't beat a good sports biopic. I can even say that about golf but I'd probably draw the line at bowling.

Don't punt on this one. Hancock and The Blind Side get a game-winning score.

Planet 51

First criticism: Planet 51 is not 3-D. This is not to say the animation isn't terrific. It is. We're all spoiled now by a series of great 3-D flicks and two dimensions just doesn't cut it anymore.

Here's the set-up. American astronaut Captain Charles T. Baker lands on what he thinks is an uninhabited planet. He plants a U.S. flag in the middle of the yard where the planet's inhabitants are enjoying a barbecue. On a societal evolutionary scale they are in an era similar to our 1950s. Most think aliens will eat their brains or turn them into zombies.

Fun idea. So is the whole 1950s sci-fi spoof. It works for about 20 minutes. And only if you grew up in the 1950s to juke boxes filled with rock and roll including Sheb Wooley's The Purple People Eater, remember the early fears of the space race and dug the heck out of great sci-fi flicks like War of the Worlds, It Came from Outer Space, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers or The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Once the novelty wears off and Planet 51 turns into a common animated feature with common animated feature plot lines, characters and dialogue, the former bobby sox and blue jeans crowd will be as bored as the children of 2009.

Coco Before Chanel

Fashion and Chanel are synonymous. Say one and the other is an automatic response. Modern folk know all about Chanel products and that most famous perfume Chanel No. 5. Few of us know much about the famous designer.

Coco Before Chanel puts a showbiz spin on the famed fashion icon's early life from a childhood spent in an orphanage to the edge of Parisian and worldwide fame. Audrey Tautou (Amelie) stars and portrays Coco as a determined gold digger. Coco moves in with a French jet set millionaire. She dazzles his friends with her independence and her male-oriented fashion daring-do. And no one did better hats than Coco. It's the hats and, uh, "other skills" that launched her career.

Coco was a 1920s and 1930s version of Paris Hilton. Only with talent.

Tautou's intense, dark, hypnotic eyes and single-minded persona drive a long and ultimately not all that interesting story. But fashion flicks aren't my thing. Beefed-up biopics about historical figures aren't either.

Outside of one or two shown by the Battelle Film Club every year, the Tri-Cities doesn't see too many French films. Fans gobble this one up while you can. It won't be here long.

Man on Wire

On Aug. 7, 1974, Frenchman Philippe Petit and his team strung a wire between the World Trade Center's twin towers. While the police and security officials were frantic to get him to stop, Petit spent 45 minutes cavorting between one tower and the other 110 floors up.

His walk is intense. There just isn't enough decent footage, or interesting information to keep you from feeling like writer/director James Marsh is not stretching his documentary. Once Marsh gets to the few minutes the movie spends on the actual event, Man on Wire boggles the mind. It just takes a little bit too long to get there.

◗ Go to Mr. Movie's blog at tricityherald.com/arts/mrmovie.