Movie Review: "The Blind Side", or, I'd rather watch "Titanic" again

I will tell you what I think of "The Blind Side."  Why not review "E.T." or "Terms of Endearment", you ask?  Yes yes, I know.  I'm a little late to the party with this one, but I knew I wasn't going to like it so I waited for it to come out on DVD, which it did very recently.  This is a stupid movie for a host of reasons, but I'll focus on just one: What if Big Mike had turned out to NOT be a football superstar?  What if he had continued to get shit grades and have a face full of snaggled up teeth and had continued to move around in the world with the speed of an inanimate object and have the personality of a doorknob?  What if he had been more like, say, Precious?  This movie bugs mostly because it makes it seem like the family who adopts him is doing him this huge favor, but they end up not even having to pay for him to go to college.  They feed him a steady diet of Taco Bell, and they don't even fix his teeth.  No braces.  No college tuition.  Free chalupa diet.  And a built-in body guard for their dork-ass son.

Say, I feel like adopting.  I wonder if Brian Urlacher needs a new home.  Brian Urlacher, do you want to sleep on my sofa?  That's about the equivalent level of altruism, don't you think?

This reminds me of something I saw on the dumb Today show, which I hate for lots of reasons.  The reason I hated it most recently was that they did a story on this woman who had a loving husband, six children, a dozen grandchildren, a big beautiful house, and a horse.  She also had some type of terminal cancer and her family helped her fight it and they were raising awareness, which is not the part I'm knocking.  The part I'm knocking is she had a loving husband, six children, a dozen grandchildren, a big beautiful house, and a horse.  Can someone please tell me what is sad about that?  She also had health insurance and she was getting the best treatment someone else's money could buy.  Her doctors at the Mayo Clinic liked her so much, they were going out of their way to fight for her to get experimental treatments, and the treatments appeared to be effective.  They didn't say this, but I bet she had a fancy car, and probably the circus lives in her back yard, and Keebler elves live in her trees and put fresh-baked cookies on her windowsills every morning.  The dumb Today show built it up like this woman was so unfortunate, but from what I could tell, she had a pretty awesome fucking life.  Also, she was OLD.  She'd seen her six healthy, successful children get married and have their own children.

The dumb Today show got it all wrong.  Here's the story the dumb Today show SHOULD have done: somewhere on Lower Wacker, there is a homeless Viet Nam veteran with prostate cancer, only he hasn't been diagnosed because he hasn't been to the doctor since they turned him away from the VA hospital the last time he went.  They told him his PTSD wasn't real, his symptoms were untreatable, and treatment for his psychiatric problems wasn't covered by insurance.  I wanna see the show about the guy who has nothing, no family, no one to love or take care of him, including his government, and show what it's like for that guy to have cancer.

Whoops!  Got a little angry there for a minute... let's cheer up and talk about a movie that I watched right after I watched "The Blind Side": "Titanic"

Again, I realize that I'm not exactly coming out in front of this one.  I’m 13 years tardy with this movie review, but "Titanic" was on TBS tonight.  It’s so watchable, even though it is long.  And really dumb.  Even though I don’t like it, I’ve seen it a number of times.  When it first came out in 1997, I had no desire to see it.  It had been so obnoxiously hyped as the most expensive movie ever made.  Also, there’s the problem of the Celine Dion love ballad.  I was boycotting it for that reason alone.  The other reason was, I knew the ending.  I knew the ending because everything I know about the Titanic comes from a song my mom taught me when I was little and it is one of my favorite songs:

When they built the ship Titanic

To sail the ocean blue

They said it was a ship

That the water would never go through

It was on its maiden trip

When the iceberg hit the ship

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea

[here’s the tactful part I made up to go in harmony with the chorus]

(husbands and wives, little children lost their lives)

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was off the English shore

‘bout a thousand miles or more

When the rich refused

to associate with the with the poor

so they put ‘em down below

where they’d be the first to go

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea

[and again with the good taste]

(uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants)

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

So the moral of my story

As you can plainly see

Is to wear a life preserver

And never go out to sea

For the Lord’s almighty hands

Knew the ship would never land

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It

Was

Oh

So

Sad

Blub blub blub blub blub

You have to do the "blub blub blub blub blub" part at the end to make it clear that you have no compassion for drowning victims.

So, I had no intention of seeing this movie.  However, I was home for Christmas break and my dad and my brother went to see it without me and my mom, because my mom and I were convinced that we had our song.  We didn’t need a movie too.  But all through Christmas dinner, my dad and my brother were talking about how great "Titanic" was.  Mike was saying how amazing the editing was, and he is an editor, so I started to wonder if I was missing out.  When I got back to school, my boyfriend’s family had worn him down about it as well, so we went to see "Titanic."  We were both skeptical.  My boyfriend’s mother had for some reason given him the Titanic soundtrack for Christmas, and he kept playing "My Heart Will Go On" in his apartment, and my roommate, who was a dude (and not even gay!), kept singing it around our house.  The song was everywhere.  In my yoga class.  At the mall.  I wanted to smack everyone.

Besides the horrific soundtrack, there were two other things that bugged about this movie.  First off, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet don’t match up so great.  I don’t think that Kate Winslet (then or now) is overweight, but Leo was pretty young and scrawny at that time, and I recall a movie reviewer saying that watching them make out in an old-timey car in the basement of the boat was like watching a Chihuahua mount a Great Dane.  While I felt this was unjust to Kate, I agree that all the making out in the movie is somewhat awkward.  Besides, on principle, I hate love stories.  They give everyone on planet earth the wrong idea about the way things are supposed to happen when you're in love.  Unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment.  And, very often, sex in hot tubs.

Second, the villain in the movie was so badly portrayed that he may as well have had a glint in his evil smile (with a sound effect) and been stroking a black cat in every scene.  He tries to get on the first life boat with the women and children.  No one could be that evil, not even an evil person, not even in a movie, and not even in my actual life, in which some men have behaved abysmally.

I love how they make it look like the poor people in the basement are having so much fun at their dancing and drinking parties every night. My family came over in steerage on boats like that around the same time and all they ever said was that it rained all the time, there were rats, everyone was always seasick and green and had typhus, and if you had any babies with you, they died.  I lost four aunts and uncles to these boats.  No one was dancing and singing.  They were having back-up children.

All of the acting in this picture is supremely bad. The only good acting is Kathy Bates as the lovable Molly Brown, who looks out for Jack by lending him her son's tuxedo and being some kind of feminist because she rides on boats alone. Molly Brown is the only one who wants to go back for the survivors.  The other acting that is good is done by the men in the string quartet who continue to play as the ship goes down. This is the part of the picture that will make you start to weep, and when I think of dying at its finest, there should always be a string quartet.

I don’t mind that the movie is long, or that Bill Paxton is wearing a giant hoop earring, or that they keep showing extreme close ups of the old lady’s eyes even though her glaucoma is repulsive.  I don’t mind that James Cameron is some kind of legendary dick in the industry, or that children in Burundi are crying even today over the amount of potable water that was wasted in the making of the film.  I don’t care that no one, NO ONE, likes the ending, in which the old lady sneakily drops the 96-karat Heart of the Ocean off the ship and seems pleased about it, the haggedy old hag.  She really shouldn’t have done that.  Do you think her grandkids enjoyed that ending?  Do you think they might have been a bit ruffled when they saw how things actually went down.  “Hey, Grandma, do you think I might have liked to, say, go to college, or have a Vespa?”

But I don’t even care that that old lady was an asshole.  What I really don’t like about this movie is that I don’t get why she didn’t share the door with Jack.  Why did she take the whole door for herself and make Jack hang on in the freezing cold water?  If there wasn’t room for both of them on the floating door, why didn’t they take turns?  Rose is lying on the door, and she’s whining about how cold she is, and Jack, completely submerged in the freezing cold water, is giving her a pep talk about how she’s going to die an old lady warm in her bed.  So fine, she lets him die, but if she loved him so well, why did she rip his cold dead fingers off the door and push him into the water?  He was fastened on pretty good by the time he was frozen to death.  Why didn’t she tote him with her and give him a proper burial at home?  What a jerk.  If the man I loved, who had just single-handedly saved my life heroically and repeatedly, died right before my eyes because I wouldn’t share the door, I would at least not be such a jerkoff about it after I’d murdered him.

The only sexy parts of the movie involve Leonardo DiCaprio.  Even when Rose is lying naked on the fainting couch, the only sexy part of the scene are the close ups of Leo’s eyes while he’s drawing her.  And the prettiest thing in the entire movie is when Leo is standing at the top of the Grand Staircase in front of the clock in his borrowed tux and slicked back blond hair and he turns around to look at Rose.

["Hi. I'm here to save your life, fatso."]

It must suck to be Kate Winslet in this picture and be all dressed up and still be only the 4th or 5th most attractive thing in the movie, after your male co-star and Kathy Bates' giant hats.

Jack isn’t just a gorgeous specimen, he’s resourceful.  The hottest thing about Jack is that he knows exactly what to do.  There is nothing hotter than a man who knows what to do, especially in situations where you don’t know what to do.  Like when a giant boat becomes perpendicular with the ocean and cracks in half.  Here are all the things he knows: He knows to be on the half that goes down second, and then he knows to stay on the boat as long as possible, and to get as high up on one end as possible, and to get on the other side of the railing so they can sit on the railing instead of hanging from it.  And then, as the ship is on its final descent into the sea, he even had his arm around her and is protecting her and he gives her directions and tells her that the ship is going to suck them down and to take a deep breath when he tells her to and to kick for the surface.  He says, “Keep kicking and do not to let go of my hand!”  I mean, this guy is a gem, and even though I do not like this movie, I get totally sucked in every time I see this part, and then he says, “We’re gonna make it, Rose. Trust me.”  And Rose says, “I trust you, and as soon as I get my hands on a floating door, I’m gonna toss you off of it.  Oh, and by the way, I have a life preserver and you don’t.”  Then, when they fall in the water, HE FINDS THE DOOR!  She has a life vest and he doesn’t and he comes over and finds her and he gets her to swim to the door and he puts her on it and she just lies there and is like,

["How’s the water, sucka?"]

So, I don't even like this movie, and still, I just wail my way through this whole part, and I don't know if it's because the Jack character is so impossibly cool that he could never, ever have existed in real life, or because I know that any man I am ever with is likely to rip the life preserver off my back and swim away on a door leaving me to freeze to death in the North Sea.