Sandra Bullock — Courage at the Top
Sandra Bullock in 'The Blind Side'
Bullock with Ryan Reynolds in 'The Proposal'
At a career stage when most lead actresses fade from the limelight, Sandra Bullock emerged this year with her two personal best box office openers: The Proposal and The Blind Side. Moreover, with her all-time top opener The Blind Side, she did it on her own … as the sole marquee anchor … in a marketplace crowded with new event pictures … by delivering a charismatic Oscar-worthy performance … like nothing she has done before … in a genre different from her usual chick-flick comedies, phone-it-in romances and thrillers buoyed by a popular male co-star. Bullock ought to garner great respect within industry circles for creating this compassionate in-your-face mother character as well as for her bold choice in selecting this project.
Certainly, Bullock knew that if The Blind Side did not work with audiences, studio chiefs might well have regarded it as a decline in her stardom. Instead Bullock signals that her best is yet to come.
Against this tapestry, and despite a strong box office and exuberant audience responses, critical support for The Blind Side has ranged from tepid to downright disgraceful: Good movies should be more than the sum of their parts. They should each possess a unique and inspired blend of story elements, actor performances, visual spectacle, social relevance and emotional journey. Sometimes one aspect will dominate more than another. Yet too often film critics base their judgments almost entirely on an obligatory check list of naturalistic story ingredients. For example, ABC-TV’s At the Movies broadcast reviewers audaciously gauged the storyline for The Blind Side against the storyline for Precious. Uh, guys - hello - Precious is fiction; The Blind Side is a true story that inspires and showcases a brilliant and courageous actress.
Even more disappointing, these reviewers recommend that moviegoers “skip” this film altogether … a recommendation that, thankfully, has been spectacularly ignored by the public. Most movie consumers increasingly distrust movie critics precisely because of such cynical, self-defeating, foolish and out-of-touch intemperance. It is also the reason Marquee Stars published The Seven Bewilderly Sins of critical reviewers.
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World's Favorite Films 2010
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World Favorite Foreign Language Films 2010
Yip Man 2 (Chinese)
My Name Is Khan (Bollywood)
Nodame Cantabile 2 (Japanese)
Blood Brothers: Secret Reunion (Korean)
L'arnacoeur (French)
Doraemon: Mermaid Adventure (Japanese)
Little Big Soldier (Chinese)
La rafle (French)
Io, loro e Lara (Italian)
Liar Game (Japanese)
Our Rossiya (Russian)
Younger Brother (Japanese)
Housefull (Bollywood)
Harmony (Korean)
Go Lala Go (Chinese)
Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf 2 (Chinese)
Chico Xavier (Portuguese)
Kandahar (Russian)
