Interesting item on a movie critic banned temporarily from screenings of Paramount pictures. Coincidentally, the banning came after she wrote critically of “Waiting for Superman,” the one-sided documentary on the glories of charter schools, dramatized by several children hoping to win lottery draws to attend some highly touted charter schools.
The critic, Debbie Schlussel, who is now back on the screening list, is a wild-eyed conservative (and that’s putting it kindly), by the way. Her review here. Sample comments:
Here’s a tip: if your kid’s whole future depends on winning the lottery, you’re incompetent—a bad parent and you made the wrong choices that got you to this point. You brought your kid to this brink, NOT the public schools. You didn’t teach them at home and you made the wrong choices even before that. Sadly, that’s not the point of “Waiting” at all, but it should have been. Nope, the point is that it’s our fault. It’s everyone’s fault but the parents. And that’s absurd. But it’s chic to do that in our take-no-personal-responsibility culture.
… Sorry, but many kids in the inner city aren’t learning because their parents don’t encourage them to. Their “parents” may not even be in their lives, or they may be there but on welfare or doing drugs or engaged in crime. But that’s not the well-massaged, pretty picture Guggenheim showed us. Almost every kid in this movie had a mom and a dad, and they were all great kids who were absolute geniuses and not at all behavioral problems. Do you really believe this is exemplary of most kids in the inner city, where it’s not just the schools that are failing the kids, but the kids and their parents who are failing the schools? Only if you are a moron. And that’s how I’d describe anyone who buys into this movie.