Friday 9 April 2010

The Blind side

A film starring Sandra Bullock about the raising of poor black kid in her white privileged rich family and in doing so turning him into a famous sports star. When it started and they started showing Laurence Taylor ending Joe Thiesmnann career in a famous tackle during an American Football game I was strangely heartened and some of the sports footage was well done. A good understanding of the way American education system works and more particularly the way that academic scholarships to university for sport helped fill in a bit more detail to the plot than others around me. The story was very uplifting and feel good and if a 5yr $13.8 million contract to play American football is to be considered a success.

I like some bits of the film such as the cameos from real life University coaches (lost on most of the rest of the audience) and the passion with which people support their alma mater. The involvement of the NCAA was good but I felt that it was probably only because it was dealt with in real life that it was included in the movie. I think that a far more interesting film could have been made using an investigator from the NCAA looking at Michael's story from a critical point of view posing the question "Did this family take in a large, gifted sports kid and pay for his education to a certain academic level only because they wanted him to star for the university that they went to and helped support financially?"

I was disappointed by the educational stereotypes in the film. The teachers who equate lack of formal education with stupidity, lack of differentiation in class and the way to improve education is more text books. If that had been one of my students and they had represented my teaching that way I would have been very upset. It was very clear that he was a visual learner (in his football practices) yet no lessons/ learning were geared to this mode of learning. The character of Michael was not very convincing as a person shown to be verbally bright took a long time to pick up simple footballing moves and concepts such as blocking.

The acting performances were not great. Sandy Bullock got an Oscar from her journey from loud, brash, confident mother to loud, brash, confident mother who realises that she can't control all of her children's decisions. She was ok but to me that was not the best acting performance of the year.

The movies was ok, could have been better but did make me laugh out loud on a number of occasions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Some people enjoy the film for a fims sake.