The Blind Side/YMMV

The Blind Side movie

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The NCAA agent is right, and the Tuohys are exploiting Oher in order to make sure he plays for their favorite college football team. The scene where Kathy Bates lies to Oher about bodies being under the field at Neyland Stadium is disturbing on multiple levels, not least for the way it recalls the Stepin Fetchit, minstrel show-era cowardly black servant stereotype. The portrayal of Oher as ignorant and childlike has its own Unfortunate Implications.
• As Himself: NCAA Division I college football coaches Philip Fulmer, Lou Holtz, Tom Lemming, Houston Nutt, Ed Orgeron, Pepper Rodgers, Nick Saban, and Tommy Tuberville.
  • Melody Weintraub played the history teacher that taught Michael. Thing is, Melody Weintraub was an actual teacher at Briarcrest Christian High School, the school where the events took place.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Leigh Ann tearing the Drug Dealer a new one.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: SJ. If the training montage doesn't do it for you, the college auditions sure will.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Sandra Bullock was adopting baby from New Orleans, who turned out to be an African-American boy named Louis, after Louis Armstrong. Made slightly less hilarious since she's divorcing her husband.
  • Michael Oher himself has been switched to right tackle, likely permanently, so he may never protect the blind side again.
• Mary Sue: Leigh Anne can appear like one of these sometimes, especially when she faces down a drug dealer while searching for Michael. I mean, an unaccompanied white woman walking right into a Wrong Side of the Tracks neighborhood, threatening a drug dealer, and then walking right out again? Kind of unlikely in Real Life.
• Nightmare Fuel: Miss Sue the tutor (an Ole Miss alumnus like the Touhys) tries to scare Michael away from arch-rival Tennessee by relocating the university's body farm to underneath the football field and warns him about undead hands grabbing him during football practice.
  • She wasn't talking about the body farm, but the skeletons stored by the anthropology department, which is in the stadium and one of the largest collections of modern bodies in the world. The hands reaching up to grab you however does completely count.
  • This scene, in which Miss Sue flat-out lies to Michael in order to get him to do what she and the Tuohys want, rather strongly implies that the NCAA investigator is right and that the Tuohy family has been manipulating Michael.
• Tastes Like Diabetes
• Unfortunate Implications: Despite being purportedly a biopic of Oher, the film mostly revolves around Leigh Ann Tuhoy's saintliness for rescuing a black man from the influence of other black people, here mostly portrayed as Exclusively Evil. Even her line about "You so much as cross into downtown, you will be sorry. I'm in a prayer group with the D.A., I'm a member of the NRA, and I'm always packin'" basically translates to "You keep your guns and drugs in the poor/black side of town, or I will convict or murder you."
  • Black people can escape from poverty, but only by playing sports, and only with the help of white people.

The Blind Side book

• Crowning Moment of Funny: The Tuohy's realizing they adopted a black boy before even meeting a Democrat after meeting Michael's tutor, a Democrat who disagreed with some of the aspects of working at a conservative Christian school. When the author asked them if they know any other Democrats, they have to think about it for a while.
  • Leigh Anne's hick-ish relative, upon receiving a Christmas card with the newest member of the family: "Leigh Anne, is there something you're not telling me?"
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Don't have enough good grades to get into college? Brigham Young University Online can help!