The Critique: Million Dollar Baby
I haven't seen as many movies as I have wanted in the past few months - though White Noise was a riveting cinematic highlight - so after finishing a long day full of reading Civil Procedure (Supplemental Jurisdiction.....you can feel the tension!), cooking dinner (pesto chicken...hot damn, I can cook), and my weekly Lost fixation (more on this at a later time), I decided to catch the late showing of Million Dollar Baby. It won all these awards, so it has to be good, right?
Kind of.
It's a good movie, don't get me wrong...better than the majority of the crap the fills our theaters on a weekly basis (please don't get me started on The Wedding Date). Clint Eastwood has developed into an incredibly gifted filmmaker. In fact, he is less of a filmmaker than he is a storyteller, which is what truly good filmakers are, in my opinion. But Best Picture? A truck load of other awards? Sorry, but I'm not biting.
The film begins with Clint and Morgan Freeman having a good ole fashioned "Who's More Grizzled?" contest. With all of their gravelly mutterings and aged stares, I was half expecting Robert Duvall to walk into the room and talk about the time he had to bury his best friend in an old creek bottom while they were driving cattle from Canada to Texas. What I am getting at is the basic idea that Clint and Morgan are quickly established as weather-beaten old-timers who have seen it all (in fact, Clint looks so weather-beaten, he looks like a skull...I think he went to Jerry Jones's plastic surgeon). But this ends up getting drilled into our heads until the last half-hour of the film.
As does the fact that Hilary Swank's character is a slack-jawed yokel (some folks'll never eat a skunk, but then again, some folks'll). After being introduced to her character through some graceful and touching images - she saves scraps from the diner she works at because she can't afford food, etc. - we are then subjected to a pretty mediocre accent and a sterotypically folksy demeanor.
A quick aside: It really bugs me that Swank has two Oscars. I don't put a lot of stock in the Oscars - they are more about campaigning than actual merit - but they are still a cultural icon. Swank has been in exactly two good movies, and she did a good job in both of them, but there is no way in hell that she should have two Oscars. The woman made The Next Karate Kid and The Core. The prosecution rests.
Moving on, Maggie's (Swank) entire family is essentially a cardboard cut-out modeled after the people who stand in line at the box office for tickets to the Blue Collar Comedy Tour five weeks before they go on sale. Yes, I know there are people in rural Missouri (or the studio lot at Warner Brothers, from the looks of it) who try to bilk the gov'ment out of welfare by pretending to have more kids...and these people probably try to drown their kids' dreams (don't all parents in the movies?)...but this approached absurd levels.
I read an article a few days ago that panned this movie based solely on the boxing scenes. And I have to agree for the most part. I should say that I am not a boxing aficionado by any means. I couldn't tell you how to move your feet or how to protect your position...but I know a staged fight when I see one. And these were staged. I know there have to be staged for filming purposes, but a good boxing movie makes it seem like the fight is real (Raging Bull, Rocky 1-3...4 was a little obvious, but we did beat communism!).
Maggie's first series of opponents looked like Glass Joe from Mike Tyson's Punch Out. That is kind of the point - Maggie is supposed to be a natural - but come on...she throws maybe five punches in ten fights and wins all of them in the first round. It looked more fixed than Olympic Figure Skating.
The subplots outside the ring were standard fare. Maggie lost her dad when she was young, Frankie (Eastwood) and his daughter are estranged, so they obviously fill a void in each other's life...and you see this coming a mile away. Frankie has a momentary struggle with faith...but it is done in passing, so any significance it could hope to have is lost. Scraps (Freeman) has an interesting backstory, but he is a supporting character, so it is not delved into all that much. All of it was good, but not all that compelling.
As I said, this is a good movie. You should go see it if you want to see good American filmmaking instead of crap. But this wasn't the best film of the year, not by a longshot. My guess is that the film handled a somewhat touchy subject with grace, the film as a whole wasn't too flashy (cough, The Aviator), and people like Clint Eastwood. He kind of got screwed last year when Mystic River got swallowed up in the LOTR behemoth, and as I said, he is a great director. I think that his direction actually saves the film and makes it a good one. The film never gets too emotional - and it easily could have - nor does it become preachy. The best way to describe it is graceful. Which is exactly how boxing fans describe the sport...so Clint knows what he is doing.
*** out of ****
In case you were wondering which films I thought were the best of last year, here is my Top Ten, in order:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Incredibles
Sideways
Collateral
Kill Bill: Volume Two
Bad Education
House of Flying Daggers
Before Sunset
Primer
The Motorcycle Diaries
Kind of.
It's a good movie, don't get me wrong...better than the majority of the crap the fills our theaters on a weekly basis (please don't get me started on The Wedding Date). Clint Eastwood has developed into an incredibly gifted filmmaker. In fact, he is less of a filmmaker than he is a storyteller, which is what truly good filmakers are, in my opinion. But Best Picture? A truck load of other awards? Sorry, but I'm not biting.
The film begins with Clint and Morgan Freeman having a good ole fashioned "Who's More Grizzled?" contest. With all of their gravelly mutterings and aged stares, I was half expecting Robert Duvall to walk into the room and talk about the time he had to bury his best friend in an old creek bottom while they were driving cattle from Canada to Texas. What I am getting at is the basic idea that Clint and Morgan are quickly established as weather-beaten old-timers who have seen it all (in fact, Clint looks so weather-beaten, he looks like a skull...I think he went to Jerry Jones's plastic surgeon). But this ends up getting drilled into our heads until the last half-hour of the film.
As does the fact that Hilary Swank's character is a slack-jawed yokel (some folks'll never eat a skunk, but then again, some folks'll). After being introduced to her character through some graceful and touching images - she saves scraps from the diner she works at because she can't afford food, etc. - we are then subjected to a pretty mediocre accent and a sterotypically folksy demeanor.
A quick aside: It really bugs me that Swank has two Oscars. I don't put a lot of stock in the Oscars - they are more about campaigning than actual merit - but they are still a cultural icon. Swank has been in exactly two good movies, and she did a good job in both of them, but there is no way in hell that she should have two Oscars. The woman made The Next Karate Kid and The Core. The prosecution rests.
Moving on, Maggie's (Swank) entire family is essentially a cardboard cut-out modeled after the people who stand in line at the box office for tickets to the Blue Collar Comedy Tour five weeks before they go on sale. Yes, I know there are people in rural Missouri (or the studio lot at Warner Brothers, from the looks of it) who try to bilk the gov'ment out of welfare by pretending to have more kids...and these people probably try to drown their kids' dreams (don't all parents in the movies?)...but this approached absurd levels.
I read an article a few days ago that panned this movie based solely on the boxing scenes. And I have to agree for the most part. I should say that I am not a boxing aficionado by any means. I couldn't tell you how to move your feet or how to protect your position...but I know a staged fight when I see one. And these were staged. I know there have to be staged for filming purposes, but a good boxing movie makes it seem like the fight is real (Raging Bull, Rocky 1-3...4 was a little obvious, but we did beat communism!).
Maggie's first series of opponents looked like Glass Joe from Mike Tyson's Punch Out. That is kind of the point - Maggie is supposed to be a natural - but come on...she throws maybe five punches in ten fights and wins all of them in the first round. It looked more fixed than Olympic Figure Skating.
The subplots outside the ring were standard fare. Maggie lost her dad when she was young, Frankie (Eastwood) and his daughter are estranged, so they obviously fill a void in each other's life...and you see this coming a mile away. Frankie has a momentary struggle with faith...but it is done in passing, so any significance it could hope to have is lost. Scraps (Freeman) has an interesting backstory, but he is a supporting character, so it is not delved into all that much. All of it was good, but not all that compelling.
As I said, this is a good movie. You should go see it if you want to see good American filmmaking instead of crap. But this wasn't the best film of the year, not by a longshot. My guess is that the film handled a somewhat touchy subject with grace, the film as a whole wasn't too flashy (cough, The Aviator), and people like Clint Eastwood. He kind of got screwed last year when Mystic River got swallowed up in the LOTR behemoth, and as I said, he is a great director. I think that his direction actually saves the film and makes it a good one. The film never gets too emotional - and it easily could have - nor does it become preachy. The best way to describe it is graceful. Which is exactly how boxing fans describe the sport...so Clint knows what he is doing.
*** out of ****
In case you were wondering which films I thought were the best of last year, here is my Top Ten, in order:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Incredibles
Sideways
Collateral
Kill Bill: Volume Two
Bad Education
House of Flying Daggers
Before Sunset
Primer
The Motorcycle Diaries
posted by The Humble Best at 12:59 AM
1 Comments:
excellent review. Intelligent, knowledgeable, interesting. I am persuaded to your point of view. Ought to be in print.
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