{"id":729,"date":"2006-10-01T22:33:45","date_gmt":"2006-10-02T02:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=729"},"modified":"2006-10-01T22:33:45","modified_gmt":"2006-10-02T02:33:45","slug":"i-blame-bob-mondello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=729","title":{"rendered":"I blame Bob Mondello"},"content":{"rendered":"

My family loves me. After all, I’m still alive after they came with me to Half Nelson<\/a>, which I asked for since Bob Mondello gave it a positive review<\/a> in August. It didn’t open in Tampa, so we had to wait until it came here this week at the Tampa Theatre<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Warning: movie spoiler ahead.)<\/p>\n

Mondello’s review was the most misleading recommendation of a movie I’ve relied on since my mother assured my father and I almost 20 years ago that Prick up your Ears<\/a> was a comic farce. Mondello correctly described Half Nelson<\/em> as the reverse of the standard heroic-teacher genre of film. But the film is better as a negative object lesson of everything you don’t<\/em> want a teacher to do than as serious film. This pitiful excuse for a teacher still<\/em> ends up as a magnet for 13-year-old Drey. And in the end, the writers left Drey rejecting the neighborhood drug dealer and riding off on her bike… to go find the teacher after a late-night binge.  The false dichotomy (what about going home and spending time with her mom?) says a great deal about the ability of even so-called avant-garde<\/em> film to reinforce stereotypes. A clich\u00e9 reversal can still reinforce the source clich\u00e9. <\/p>\n

My wife wanted the teacher to drive his car off a cliff. But the movie was also set up for him to die by overdose, with Drey’s mom (an EMT) finding him dead. Too bad the movie didn’t take that alternative ending.<\/p>\n

I have no problems with oddly structured or challenging movies. But in Half Nelson<\/em> I didn’t find myself challenging prior beliefs about education, race, social justice, or drug use. I just found myself challenged to believe I was still in my seat by the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My family loves me. After all, I’m still alive after they came with me to Half Nelson, which I asked for since Bob Mondello gave it a positive review in August. It didn’t open in Tampa, so we had to wait until it came here this week at the Tampa Theatre. (Warning: movie spoiler ahead.) Mondello’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-comments"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-bL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}