Word: blackly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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John Lee Hancock's movie, based on the Michael Lewis nonfiction best seller, is about Michael Oher, a homeless black teenager who was adopted by a white couple and, after many a challenge, became a star tackle at the University of Mississippi. (Today, Oher is an acclaimed rookie for the Baltimore Ravens.) A true story that sounds like it's the most improbable type of uplifting fiction, The Blind Side could have been one of the dozens of sports inspirationals that reach their core audiences, moisten many eyes and retire quickly to the DVD shelves. Yet it's obviously connecting...
...Michael's enablers are white folks. Here are the film's main black characters: his crack-addicted mother (Adriane Lenox, who's very good, considering what she's got to work with); a drug lord and his posse who try to derail Michael from his destiny; and a buppie lawyer from the NCAA who investigates a charge that the Tuohys have unfairly steered Michael, who's finally a much-recruited high school star, into the Ole Miss football program. These characters are either lost, evil or suspicious. It's as if blackness were a plague and adoption by whites...
Reviewing the movie for Slant, Aaron Cutler goes further: "The ultimate NFL destination renders the whole thing benevolently sadistic: A white community first removes Michael from other black people, then trains him to beat them up on the field." Well, The Blind Side isn't exactly Gladiator. Oher is being paid well to do what hundreds of thousands of young men dream of. And if he had been left on the streets of Memphis, he might be dead now. But for all the closeups of black-white handshakes, the movie does have a Manichean view of the racial divide...
...reporter who pretends to be Jewish while reporting a story on anti-Semitism, one of the film's crew was asked what the moral was. "Be nice to Jews," he said, "because they might turn out to be Gentiles." The Blind Side says to be nice to homeless black kids because they could become NFL stars. Whether they want to or not. Michael certainly gets a warm bed, lots of food and familial affection from the Tuohys; they gave him a purpose-driven life. But it's their purpose. They drove him there. Michael is like the docile...
...Lehigh student pulled an Ashlee Simpson on the national anthem, the Crimson went with its third-string running back—senior Cheng Ho—who had a banner day, and Harvard coach Tim Murphy traded in his signature black baseball hat for a camouflage cap with an “H” on the front and the defense’s motto “Do Work”—from the MTV reality show “Rob and Big”—on the back...