The Blind Side

Directed by John Lee Hancock, The Blind Side is based off the true story of Michael Oher, a current NFL player who was adopted by the Touhy family who helped him increase his grades in high school enough to earn a college scholarship.  Though Michael (Quinton Aaron) is a student at a private Christian school in Memphis, we see that he is homeless and has nothing more than an extra pair of clothes in a plastic bag.  Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock) notices the boy’s problems and her children are his schoolmates, her son S.J. (Jae Head) is especially fond of him.  When she sees Michael wandering in the pouring rain, she sternly asks him if he has anywhere to go and invites him into her family’s home.  As the Toughy’s learn more about Michael’s troubling past and his potential, both in the classroom and on the field, he becomes a permanent part of the family, despite the social implications.

Let’s be honest, in recent years Hollywood has usually turned non-liberal characters into the enemy.  Basically anyone who is religious, a republican or from the south is being turned into a Tea Party caricature.  In The Blind Side, Leigh Anne has all three of these usually damning traits, plus her family lives in a large beautifully decorated house with plenty of money to spare.  It’s refreshing to see the sort of characteristics we find in sappy afternoon-special movies taken seriously and turned into a truly positive role.  And best of all, the film doesn’t try to pretend that Leigh Anne is blind to her political traits, “Who would’ve thought we’d have a black son before we met a Democrat?”

Around Leigh Anne, we do see that the ugly stereotypical side of being a well-to-do southern, republican, Christian.  When she’s out to a fancy lunch with her more stuck-up friends, they make racist judgments about the dangers of letting a large black boy stay in the same house as her teenage daughter.  At the football game, we see a few fans and players of the opposing team pick on Michael because of his race.  Leigh Anne is not blind to the hate and injustice she sees around her, but stands tall against it, even when it singles her out.

Having not seen The Blind Side as I watched Bullock win her first Oscar, I could not help but be skeptical.  I mean, she was up against Streep and Mirren, two classy lady-titans, and we all loved the underdog story behind Sidibe.  Now I can see where this came from, Bullock perfectly portrays a woman who is not constrained by stereotype and becomes an inspiration without even trying.  And she’s propelled by this take-charge attitude that gives her a ferocious mother-bear feel.  Call that cheesy if you like, but I prefer this to the old myth of how to win best actress: nude scenes.

Honestly, I enjoyed this film much more than I thought I would.  It was not as sappy or religiously based as I had been told to fear.  I’ve heard people call this a movie showing positive Christian values, but I believe it’s just showing positive human values.  The moral isn’t for all rich white people to bring a poor black kid into their home.  That’s just how this story pans out.  The real idea to take away is if you see the need, do take the time to help someone out if you can.

“ If you so much as set foot downtown, you will be sorry.  I’m in a prayer group with the D.A., I’m a member of the NRA and I’m always packing.”

Dead Poets Society

“We are all destined to be worm food.”

I have understood all too well that we only have so much time to live, but there’s a thought that comes after that quote that makes it all better, “Not yet.”  At this glorious moment we are alive, breathing, with blood rushing through fueling our minds to endless possibilities.  Carpe diem: seize the day.  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  I hate to think of a wasted day, the sun setting and having nothing of interest to mark the day with.  There’s so much to see, feel, create, understand and be, I want to do a little everyday.  To share any piece of life, even these feeble words you read, make it all the more meaningful.

In director Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, this theme of carpe diem is all the more vibrant in an all boys prep school that looks like it was build to suck the vitality out of all who enter its stone walls.  Welton Academy operates under strictly under their four pillars: Tradition, Honor, Discipline, and Excellence.  Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke) is a painfully shy new boy, sent to Welton by his parents to live up to his older brother’s valedictorian status.  He is assigned to room with Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), an ambitious, vibrant and popular boy who’s stuck under his father’s strict thumb to one day become a doctor.  The boys and their friends become inspired by the new English teacher, Mr. Keating (Robin Williams), an alum of Welton who once ran a club called Dead Poets Society.

Keating runs a classroom that makes all the other teachers look already dead and forgotten.  He tells his students that the introduction of their textbook on poetry is “excrement” and has them tear it out.  At one point, he stands on his desk, not to feel taller, but to gain a new perspective, teaching his students to always try to see things differently.  Many of his lessons take place outdoors, a favorite of mine is where they read a line of poetry then kick a soccer ball.  It doesn’t seem enough to sit quietly and read, but to let it move you, literally.

Neil decides to resurrect the Dead Poets Society, where the boys sneak out at night to read poetry, tell ghost stories and smoke in the nearby caves.  As the boys become more inspired by Keating’s teachings on carpe diem, they become more immersed in the club and find their own ways to seize the day.  Neil decides to go against his father’s guidance and tries out for a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, earning the lead role.  It’s a proud moment that Keating builds Neils confidence on, but his father is ready to hand Neil some devastating consequences to snuff out his dreams of acting.

It is beautiful to see these boys discover their individual voices and know that artistic intellect carries worth.   Most of them are on a route to become lawyers, doctors and bankers.  Those are all respectable fields to be proud of, no doubt, but as Keating tells them, “Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”  Giving these boys the tools to give their life more meaning than plaques, diplomas and their name on a fancy office door is all the more honorable.

It’s nice to think of teenage boys still being inspired by their teachers and reading poetry.  I wished that happened more often, but I don’t honestly see a group of seventeen year old boys gathering together to read Whitman and Thoreau today.  Maybe alone somewhere, hiding the poetry like it was a Playboy.  Perhaps this is  just a shift in the times.  Today, my brother and his friends get together to worship their classic rock idols and have become damn good teen musicians.  Life’s marrow doesn’t only come from an impressive vocabulary in manicured stanzas, it’s whatever makes you feel alive.

“Carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”

Breaking Away

Being a Purdue Alum, Breaking Away can be hard to watch at times with that IU fight song and all.  During the film, my black and gold blood started to boil with jealousy.  IU has Oscar nominated Breaking Away, Notre Dame has my childhood favorite, Rudy.  All I could find under a keyword search on IMDB for Purdue was a short documentary from 1941 that less than five people have seen.  Boiler what?

Despite my natural revolt to it’s location, Breaking Away is a wonderful film.  Dave (Dennis Christopher) and his friends are recent high school graduates in Bloomington, Indiana.  They don’t plan on going to the town’s college, Indiana University, don’t have jobs and don’t seem to have much focus on what lies ahead of them.  There’s a wedge driven between the wealthy college students and the local working class “cutters.”  The name comes from how the quarry workers had cut the limestone for many of the buildings on IU’s campus.  Now, it seems that they aren’t good enough for the campus they helped build.

Dave is fascinated by Italian culture and cycling.  He starts teaching himself Italian and constantly rides his bike, training for and winning races.  While his Italian spirit and freedom to ride all he likes makes Dave vibrant and happy, his father Ray (Paul Dooley), is annoyed.  “He’s never tired, he’s never miserable,” he says about Dave, like it’s a bad thing.  He’s a used car salesman, a crooked one at that, and just wants his son to work and be normal.

Unfortunately, Dave starts taking his new-found Italian culture too far.  He passes himself off as an Italian exchange student to an IU sorority girl, Katherine (Robyn Douglass).  She believes Dave’s Italian act and the two start dating.  Dave also enters a race in Indianapolis in order to race alongside the Italians.  During the race, he speaks Italian to them, but they just tell him to get lost and pull some dirty tricks to get rid of him.  “Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know,” Dave says, disillusioned.

With his ideas about Italians squashed and his father suffering a breakdown because of him, Dave becomes miserable.  His father confesses, “I didn’t want you to be this miserable. A little bit’s all I asked for.”  There’s one thing that can put Dave back on top, the university’s annual bike race, the Little 500, is allowing a local team for the first time.  Dave and his friends sign up to represent all the hardworking people of Bloomington and show the disrespectful college kids what Cutters can do.

A friend of mine gave me a little more insight to how Indiana University reveres this film.  She and her friends would watch Breaking Away every year the day before the Little 500 as preparation for the festivities.  Thing is, they don’t call their townies Cutters or even Stoners as the IMBD trivia page says they did years ago.  But there is still a team named “Cutters” in the race every year, she usually cheers for them.

Also, in the film there are a lot less people at the race than there usually are in real life.  You see, IU told the producers that they could get 20,000 student extras for the scene, but only 3,000 showed up for the day of filming.  Way to represent your school.  Of course, thirty years ago they might have actually been studying.

In the end, Breaking Away is an enjoyable, inspiring sports film.  Unlike Rudy, it doesn’t make the mistake of becoming too emotional.  We love Dave because he’s kind of a goofy kid, driving his parents nuts with all that Italian stuff and yet can do amazing things on that bike.  Going down a highway at sixty miles per hour with no helmet is crazy, but passing a semi makes those smooth legs look bad-ass.  This movie may be one of the best things that has ever crossed IU’s campus.

Note: If any IU students, alumni, affiliates and/or fans were offended by my jabs, I promise it was only in good fun.  I have many friends and family affiliated with IU and we haven’t disowned each other yet.

Seabiscuit

The beginning of Seabiscuit paints a perfect image of America from the invention of the automobile, the progress of the assembly line, through the roaring twenties and then plunging into the devastation of the depression.  The idea of people packing what’s left of their lives in their car, their last possession, the very invention that changed the world within their lifetime, never made such an impact on me until I saw it all connected in Seabiscuit.  Right away, I knew this would be more than an inspirational horse story.

In the depression, everyone is down, especially the people surrounding the infamous horse.  Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire) is from a large family, but during the depression they were financially ruined and left Red to reach for this potential to become a jockey.  Problem is, Red is too tall to be a jockey, so he purges regularly to maintain weight.  He also falls into a rough lifestyle, participating in illegal boxing matches for money.  Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges)  has built himself up from a humble bicycle repairman to the most successful car salesman in California, but when he suddenly loses his only son, his life and marriage crumbles.  Then there is Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a horse trainer who has lived a very simple life among wild mustangs, but realizes his world is shrinking.  He’s the one who first sees potential in Seabiscuit.

From previews, we assume the challenge is for Seabiscuit to win races and prove everyone he’s the little horse with a big jockey who could.  There’s so much more than that and the whole downtrodden feel of the depression only amplifies the sense of victory.  There is a point where it seems like Red and Seabiscuit are on top of the world, but when tragedies occur there’s more to fight for than winning.   Yes, double trouble to put both jockey and horse in traction, I was nearly heartbroken.

It’s impossible not to see how Red’s and Seabiscuit’s young lives parallel each other.  They both have been trained or breaded for great potential, but never given the chance to succeed.  Red was well educated and loved, but now has a good amount of abandonment issues and has to fight harder than most jockeys because of his size.  When Seabiscuit’s story is told, in sort of a storybook feel, we learn that he was bread to be a race horse, but is too small.  Instead he is trained to lose to other horses in order to build their self esteem.  When he is finally raced, he loses, just as he was trained to.

I found myself getting really into the races.  The rhythm of hooves thundering flinging dirt, the rivalries that start in the gate and intensify until the photo finish.  The mix of closeup images and quick editing help make every race extremely exciting.  I found myself cheering on Seabiscuit from my couch half the time.

If you’ve got a little girl going through her pony phase, this may not be the best film for her.  Her childhood fantasies may be filled with rainbows, tea parties and braiding the horses mane.  Seabiscuit is a horse so beaten down by the world, he’s just pissed and wants an opportunity.  I doubt a little girl would really understand or appreciate that.  And later in the film, she may just cry knowing how badly her precious pony is hurt.  It’s rated PG-13 with good reason.

“You know, you don’t throw a whole life away just ’cause he’s banged up a little.”